Complexity Digest 2002.36 September-08-2002

 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, 2000

  1. Information Hiding in Product Development: The Design Churn Effect, MIT Sloan Working Paper
  2. 'The Innovation Factor: Your Brain on Innovation', Inc.com
  3. Sleep Forms Memory For Finger Skills, PNAS
  4. Ageing: A Lethal Side-Effect, Nature
    1. New Visions Of The Aging Mind And Brain, Trends in Cog. Sc.
  5. All Living Things Think, No Matter How Teensy, NYTimes Books
  6. Cognitive Neuroscience: The Molecules Of Forgetfulness, Nature
  7. Coordination Of Circadian Timing In Mammals, Nature
  8. Musical Minds, Trends in Cog. Sc.
    1. Quality Of Song Learning Affects Female Response To Male Bird Song, Royal Society Proc. Biol. Sc.
    2. Musical Approach Helps Programmers Catch Bugs, New Scientist
  9. The Mind Of The Sex Offender, Newsday
  10. Godmother’ Ant Uses Mob Tactics To Rub Out Rivals, Alphagalileo
  11. Rainstorms Could Trigger Killer Eruptions, New Scientist
  12. Mysterious Smog On Saturn's Moon May Hide Clues To Origins Of Life, San Francisco Chronicle
    1. Scientists Look Out For Pollution Answers, The Associated Press
  13. On Farms, A No-Till Tactic On Global Warming, The Washington Post
  14. JohnnyVon: Self-Replicating Automata in Continuous Two-Dimensional Space, CogPrints
  15. Protein-DNA Computation By Stochastic Assembly Cascade, PNAS
  16. Creating A Smarter Computer, 'Chatterbot' Programs Use Net, The Washington Post
  17. Co-Evolutionary Games on Networks, arXiv
  18. Hierarchical Organization of Modularity in Metabolic Networks, Science
  19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks
    1. Confronting Anti-American Grievances, NYTimes
    2. How We Won the War, NYTimes
  20. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Webcast Announcements
    3. Conference Announcements
    4. Biodiversity Learning Center, Online Course Announcement

1. Information Hiding in Product Development: The Design Churn Effect, MIT Sloan Working Paper

Abstract: Execution of a complex product development project is facilitated through its decomposition into an interrelated set of localized development tasks. When a local task is completed, its output is integrated through an iterative cycle of system-wide integration activities. Integration is often accompanied by inadvertent information hiding due to the asynchronous information exchanges. We show that information hiding leads to persistent recurrence of problems (termed as the design churn effect) such that progress oscillates between being on schedule and falling behind. The oscillatory nature of the PD process confounds progress measurement and makes it difficult to judge whether the project is on schedule or slipping. We develop a dynamic model of work transformation to derive conditions under which churn is observed as an unintended consequence of information hiding due to local and system task decomposition. We illustrate these conditions with a case example from an automotive development project and discuss strategies to mitigate design churn.

 

2. 'The Innovation Factor: Your Brain on Innovation', Inc.com

Excerpts: A brain-imaging experiment (…), found that a particular network in the brain -- based in the lateral frontal cortex of one or both hemispheres -- is activated when people are involved in complex thought. The region remains quiet during more routine thought. "My guess is that this is the kind of network that you might find operating in creative people at the moment that they're being creative," (…). The discovery of the network leads to some intriguing theories about why people often fail to come up with creative solutions when they're focusing on a problem but succeed later, when they're doing other things, like taking a shower or watching a movie.

 

3. Sleep Forms Memory For Finger Skills, PNAS

Excerpts: Practicing a motor skill triggers a process of memory consolidation that continues for hours after practice has ended, and becomes manifest in an improved skill at later testing. We used a sequential motor task (finger-to-thumb opposition task) to show that, in humans, the formation of motor skill memories essentially benefits from sleep. Independent of whether placed during daytime or nighttime, sleep after practice enhanced speed of sequence performance on average by 33.5% and reduced error rate by 30.1% as compared with corresponding intervals of wakefulness. (…) The observations demonstrate a critical role of sleep for storing and optimizing motor skills.

 

4. Ageing: A Lethal Side-Effect, Nature

Excerpts: Ageing occurs in natural populations - as individuals get older they become less fecund and more likely to die. Organisms ranging from yeast to mammals to plants are affected. Cars and washing machines wear out too, which suggests that ageing could be an inevitable consequence of complexity.

But at least some things do not age. All organisms living today are descended from lineages that have been going strong for three billion years. (…) So if ageing is not inevitable, surely such a universal and ultimately lethal process must have a purpose?

.

Abstract: Cognitive aging is widely viewed as a process of progressive mental loss. Compelling new evidence from functional neuroimaging urges a reconsideration of this pessimistic view. In the domains of working memory and episodic memory, older adults recruit different brain regions from those recruited by younger adults when performing the same tasks. Specifically, older adults show prominent changes in the recruitment of prefrontal regions, and a conspicuous increase in the extent to which activation patterns are bilateral. These results are stimulating new hypotheses about the mechanisms underlying age-related cognitive declines and the potential for compensation.

 

5. All Living Things Think, No Matter How Teensy, NYTimes Books

Excerpts: Frank T. Vertosick Jr., a neurosurgeon, has written a book that's an argument for a grand idea: most living things operate according to the same general model. That model is a network. A network is a self-regulating community of small things. "I could summarize the main thesis of this book in one sentence," he writes: "Life is a network." (…)

Intelligence emerges from networks because their subunits follow certain rules: they are all connected, they communicate through these connections, and they can strengthen or weaken the connections.

 

6. Cognitive Neuroscience: The Molecules Of Forgetfulness, Nature

Excerpts: Not everything that we learn is useful, so the brain needs a mechanism to prevent itself being burdened by unhelpful details. The molecular details of this mechanism are now being uncovered.

Studies of the molecular and cellular foundations of cognitive processes have come of age with the development of techniques that allow genes to be over-expressed, deleted or modified in mice. (…) The result is the birth of a field that is unravelling the basis of learning, remembering, and now (…) forgetting.

 

7. Coordination Of Circadian Timing In Mammals, Nature

Excerpt: Time in the biological sense is measured by cycles that range from milliseconds to years. Circadian rhythms, which measure time on a scale of 24 h, are generated by one of the most ubiquitous and well-studied timing systems. At the core of this timing mechanism is an intricate molecular mechanism that ticks away in many different tissues throughout the body. However, these independent rhythms are tamed by a master clock in the brain, which coordinates tissue-specific rhythms according to light input it receives from the outside world.

 

8. Musical Minds, Trends in Cog. Sc.

Abstract: Music might be described as just a special form of noise, but evidence is accumulating to show that listening to it can lead to pronounced physiological and emotional responses. In a recent article, Trainor et al. have shown that specific aspects of musical structure are processed automatically in the human brain, raising the question of whether our response to music has specifically evolved or merely occurs as a side-effect of neural architecture.

 

Abstract: Bird song is unusual as a sexually selected trait because its expression depends on learning as well as genetic and other environmental factors. We asked whether more subtle variation in male song-learning abilities influences female response to song. (…) we measured the response of female song sparrows to songs of laboratory-reared males that differed in the amount of learned versus invented material (…). Females responded significantly more to songs that had been learned better, by either measure. Females did not discriminate between the best-learned songs of laboratory-reared males and songs of wild males used as models during learning.

 

Excerpts: Making music out of computer code is helping programmers to catch the bugs that can cause software to go awry.(…)

So-called debugging software can iron this out, by letting people look at a graphical representation of a program. This helps find bugs by highlighting which parts of a program are communicating with others.

But the computer's sound capabilities are ignored in debugging, (…)

So Vickers and James Alty of Loughborough University developed a system that automatically converts computer program code written in Pascal into simple "music".

 

9. The Mind Of The Sex Offender, Newsday

Excerpt: Scientists who study the minds of child molesters and rapists are getting closer to unraveling the biological, genetic and social forces that lead to such acts. Identifying similar personality features and shared behavioral conditions could ultimately lead to new and better treatments. (...)

Robert Prentky, a scientist at the Justice Research Institute in Bridgewater, Mass., and one of the organizers of the conference, said that there are so many types of sex offenders - including pedophiles, rapists and sexual sadists - it's been hard to develop theories that address all the complex behaviors that drive these different abnormal acts. Scientists know little about the development of normal sexual behavior at different stages of life and what behavior actually poses a risk, Prentky said. (...)

 

10. Godmother’ Ant Uses Mob Tactics To Rub Out Rivals, Alphagalileo

Excerpts: (…) Dinosaur ants, and the Mafia have something in common. Both have dominant leaders who give rivals a “kiss of death”, as a signal for their ‘mob’ to punish the offender. The alpha female in a colony of Dinosaur ants marks rival females with a chemical which signals lower ranking ants in the colony to punish the “pretender”. This secures the alpha female’s position as the only breeding female within the colony. Dinosaur ants, from Brazil, are the world’s largest ant, at about 3 to 4cm long. (…) the alpha ant is not a queen, but a mated worker.

 

11. Rainstorms Could Trigger Killer Eruptions, New Scientist

Excerpts: The most dangerous type of volcanic eruption can be triggered by heavy rain, UK researchers have found. (…)

The type of eruption in question is a "dome collapse". This form of eruption has caused more than 70 per cent of volcano-related deaths over the past century. (…)

The Mount St Helens eruption on 18 May 1980, for example, sent a cloud of 520 million tonnes of ash 25 kilometres into the air. Rock and debris fell to Earth up to 30 kilometres from the volcano.

 

12. Mysterious Smog On Saturn's Moon May Hide Clues To Origins Of Life, San Francisco Chronicle

Excerpt: As Earth-bound astronomers wait and ponder the mysterious nature of a giant moon that circles the planet Saturn, computer scientists believe they have modeled a solution to at least one of its major puzzles.

The moon is Titan - a strange anomaly in the solar system and the only planetary satellite with a thick atmosphere of its own. That atmosphere, full of the chemicals involved in life itself, is dominated by nitrogen and traces of methane, but even the best of telescopes cannot pierce the thick, dark-orange clouds of what can only be photochemical smog that eternally shrouds its entire surface. (...)

 

Excerpt: (...) But what smog-causing pollution does when the sun sets is still a mystery to scientists, and one they say needs to be solved if pollution regulation is going to work.

"We don't have a good idea about what's going on at night," said Carl Berkowitz, a scientist for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "And if we don't understand what goes on at night, we can't have confidence that we know the best way to fight smog during the day." (...)

 

13. On Farms, A No-Till Tactic On Global Warming, The Washington Post

Excerpt: For farmers struggling to make a living with corn and soybeans, a new cash crop may be on the horizon: carbon. Although it can't be used to feed animals or make vegetable oil, "farming" carbon could provide extra income for farmers and provide significant environmental benefits.

A $15 million project being carried out by 10 universities in the Midwest has the goal of encouraging farmers to use methods, including "no-till" farming, that keep carbon in the soil rather than releasing it to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide gas. Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases considered a culprit in global warming. (...)

 

14. JohnnyVon: Self-Replicating Automata in Continuous Two-Dimensional Space, CogPrints

Abstract: JohnnyVon is an implementation of self-replicating automata in continuous two-dimensional space. Two types of particles drift about in a virtual liquid. The particles are automata with discrete internal states but continuous external relationships. Their internal states are governed by finite state machines but their external relationships are governed by a simulated physics that includes brownian motion, viscosity, and spring-like attractive and repulsive forces. The particles can be assembled into patterns that can encode arbitrary strings of bits. We demonstrate that, if an arbitrary “seed” pattern is put in a “soup” of separate individual particles, the pattern will replicate by assembling the individual particles into copies of itself. We also show that, given sufficient time, a soup of separate individual particles will eventually spontaneously form self-replicating patterns. We discuss the implications of JohnnyVon for research in nanotechnology, theoretical biology, and artificial life.

 

15. Protein-DNA Computation By Stochastic Assembly Cascade, PNAS

Abstract: The assembly of RecA on single-stranded DNA is measured and interpreted as a stochastic finite-state machine that is able to discriminate fine differences between sequences, a basic computational operation.

RecA filaments efficiently scan DNA sequence through a cascade of random nucleation and disassembly events that is mechanistically similar to the dynamic instability of microtubules. This iterative cascade is a multistage kinetic proofreading process that amplifies minute differences, even a single base change.

Our measurements suggest that this stochastic Turing-like machine can compute certain integral transforms.

 

16. Creating A Smarter Computer, 'Chatterbot' Programs Use Net, The Washington Post

Excerpt: Using the "cookies" that sites use to identify and track Web users, the program analyzes the routes people take to get information and tries to simplify them. The software mimics the human brain, strengthening, dissolving and even creating hyperlinks on a page based on patterns of use; the Web pages act like neurons, and the links act like the synapses between them. If it finds that people often go from A to B to C, it will create a path directly from A to C.

 

17. Co-Evolutionary Games on Networks, arXiv

Abstract: We study agents on a network playing an iterated Prisoner's dilemma against their neighbors. The resulting spatially extended co-evolutionary game exhibits stationary states which are Nash equilibria. After perturbation of these equilibria, avalanches of mutations reestablish a stationary state. Scale-free avalanche distributions are observed that are in accordance with calculations from the Nash equilibria and a confined branching process. The transition from subcritical to critical avalanche dynamics can be traced to a change in the degeneracy of the cooperative macrostate and is observed for many variants of this game.

 

18. Hierarchical Organization of Modularity in Metabolic Networks, Science

Excerpts: Spatially or chemically isolated functional modules composed of several cellular components and carrying discrete functions are considered fundamental building blocks of cellular organization, but their presence in highly integrated biochemical networks lacks quantitative support. Here, we show that the metabolic networks of 43 distinct organisms are organized into many small, highly connected topologic modules that combine in a hierarchical manner into larger, less cohesive units, with their number and degree of clustering following a power law. (…) The identified network architecture may be generic to system-level cellular organization.

 

19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks

Excerpts: Nearly a year after the start of America's war on terrorism, that war faces the real risk of being hijacked by foreign governments with repressive agendas. Instead of leading a democratic coalition, the United States faces the risk of dangerous isolation. (…)

Missing from much of the public debate is discussion of the simple fact that lurking behind every terroristic act is a specific political antecedent. That does not justify either the perpetrator (…). Nonetheless, the fact is that almost all terrorist activity originates from some political conflict (…).

 

Excerpts: The American fleet confidently steamed off to war in the Persian Gulf recently - and promptly got creamed. (…)

The game, Millennium Challenge 2002, was the largest such simulation ever held, involving 13,500 people. It began, key participants say, with the Americans confidently assuming that they could intercept enemy communications (…).

But the enemy didn't cooperate. It used motorcycle couriers instead of radio and electronic messages, and sent orders as code words inserted into the muezzins' call to prayer - and this went right by the American intelligence analysts.

 

20. Links & Snippets

20.1 Other Publications
  1. Agriculture: Widespread Local House-Sparrow Extinctions, David G. Hole, Mark J. Whittingham, Richard B. Bradbury, Guy Q. A. Anderson, Patricia L. M. Lee, Jeremy D. Wilson, John R. Krebs, Nature 418, 931 - 932 (2002); doi:10.1038/418931a
  2. Delayed-Feedback Control Of Chaotic Roll Motion Of A Flooded Ship In Waves, Mitsubori & Aihara, Proceedings: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences , The Royal Society, 29 August 2002
  3. Chaos In The Hodgkin--Huxley Model, J. Guckenheimer & R. A. Oliva, SIAM J. Appl. Dynamical Sys., Vol. 1 (1), pp.:105-114, 2002
  4. The Occurrence Of Limit-Cycles During Feedback Control Of Microwave Heating, B. Liu & T.R. Marchant, Math. and Comp. Modelling, Vol. 35 (9-10), pp.:1095-1118, 2002.
  5. Neural Delays, Visual Motion And The Flash-Lag Effect, R. Nijhawan, Trends in Cog. Sc., Vol. 6, Issue 9, pp.:387-393, September 2002
  6. Decision-Making Deficits In Drug Addiction, L. Clark & T. W. Robbins  Trends in Cog. Sc., Vol. 6, Issue 9, pp.: 361-363, September 2002
  7. Newer Design Of Close-Up Computer Monitors Increases Ease Of Use, ScienceDaily, Posted 8/30/2002
  8. Getting Better Can Be Dangerous, A. Macaskill, The British Psycho. Soc., Alphagalileo, 03 September 2002
  9. Recognizing Novel Three-Dimensional Objects By Summing Signals From Parts And Views, Foster & Gilson, Proceedings: Biological Sciences, The Royal Society, 29 August 2002
  10. Towards A Coherent Philosophy For Modelling The Environment, K. Beven, Proceedings: Mathematical, Physical & Engineering Sciences, The Royal Society, 29 July 2002
  11. Modeling Directional Selectivity Using Self-Organizing Delay-Aadaptation Maps, Tversky, Tal, Miikkulainen, Risto, CogPrints, 2002
  12. Spatial Representation of Temporal Information by Networks that Learn , Thomas Nowotny, Misha I. Rabinovich, Henry D.I. Abarbanel, arXiv Paper ID: nlin/0209011. 2002-09-04
  13. Optimal Network Topologies for Local Search with Congestion. R. Guimera, A. Arenas, A. Diaz-Guilera, F. Vega-Redondo, A. Cabrales, arXiv.
  14. Rerendering Semantic Ontologies: Automatic Extensions to UMLS through Corpus Analytics. J. Pustejovsky, A. Rumshisky, J. Castano, arXiv.
  15. Analysis of Non-Gaussian Nature of Network Traffic and its Implication on Network Performance. Tatsuya Mori, Ryoichi Kawahara, Shozo Naito, arXiv.
  16. Wave Chaos in the Elastic Disc. Niels Sondergaard, Gregor Tanner, arXiv.
  17. Implications of Correlated Default For Portfolio Allocation To Corporate Bonds. Mark B. Wise, Vineer Bhansali, arXiv.
  18. Chaos and Incomplete Information. Qiuping A. Wang, arXiv.
  19. Time Interval Distribution of Earthquakes. Sumiyoshi Abe, Norikazu Suzuki, arXiv.
  20. Probabilistic Traffic Flow Breakdown In Stochastic Car Following Models. Dominic Jost, Kai Nagel, arXiv.
  21. Absence of Epidemic Threshold in Scale-free Networks with Connectivity Correlations. Marian Boguna, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, Alessandro Vespignani, arXiv.
  22. Quantum Mechanics, Path Integrals and Option Pricing: Reducing the Complexity of Finance. Belal E. Baaquie, Claudio Coriano, Marakani Srikant, arXiv.
  23. Are the Contemporary Financial Fluctuations Sooner Converging to Normal?. S. Drozdz, J. Kwapien, F. Gruemmer, F. Ruf, J. Speth, arXiv.
  24. Stability of Shortest Paths in Complex Networks with Random Edge Weights. Jae Dong Noh, Heiko Rieger, arXiv.
  25. Statistical Properties of Neutral Evolution. Ugo Bastolla, Markus Porto, H. Eduardo Roman, Michele Vendruscolo, arXiv.
  26. Evolutionary Games and Quasispecies. M. Laessig, L. Peliti, F. Tria, arXiv.
  27. Kinematics of Stock Prices. M. Serva, U.L. Fulco, M.L. Lyra, G.M. Viswanathan, arXiv.
  28. Biofilms As Complex Differentiated Communities, P. Stoodley, K. Sauer, D. G. Davies, J. W. Costerton, Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 2002 January 1; 56(1): p. 187-209
  29. Microbial Communities And Their Interactions In Soil And Rhizosphere Ecosystems, Angela D. Kent, Eric W. Triplett, Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 2002 January 1; 56(1): p. 211-236
  30. Prions As Protein-Based Genetic Elements, Susan M. Uptain, Susan Lindquist, Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 2002 January 1; 56(1): p. 703-741
  31. Biology and Evolution of Highly Reduced Intracellular Parasites, Patrick J. Keeling, Naomi M. Fast, Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 2002 January 1; 56(1): p. 93-116
  32. Lyme Vaccine In The Lab, Ridgely Ochs, Newsday, 8/27/02
  33. Molecular Indetermination In The Transition To Error Catastrophe: Systematic Elimination Of Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis Virus Through Mutagenesis Does Not Correlate Linearly With Large Increases In Mutant Spectrum Complexity, A. Grande-Perez, S. Sierra, M. G. Castro, E. Domingo, P. R. Lowenstein, PNAS published 5 September 2002, 10.1073/pnas.182426999
  34. Continued Evolutionary Surprises Among Dinoflagellates, Clifford W. Morden, Alison R. Sherwood, PNAS 2002;99 11558-11560
  35. Formation Of Geometrically Complex Lipid Nanotube-Vesicle Networks Of Higher-Order Topologies, Mattias Karlsson, Kristin Sott, Maximillian Davidson, Ann-Sofie Cans, Pontus Linderholm, Daniel Chiu, Owe Orwar, PNAS 2002;99 11573-11578
  36. Circadian Genes In A Blind Subterranean Mammal II: Conservation And Uniqueness Of The Three Period Homologs In The Blind Subterranean Mole Rat, Spalax ehrenbergi Superspecies, Aaron Avivi, Henrik Oster, Alma Joel, Avigdor Beiles, Urs Albrecht, Eviatar Nevo, PNAS 2002;99 11718-11723
  37. The Clothing Effect: Tactile Neurons In The Precentral Gyrus Do Not Respond To The Touch Of The Familiar Primate Chair, Michael S. A. Graziano, Shalani E. Alisharan, Xintian Hu, Charles G. Gross, PNAS 2002;99 11930-11933
  38. From Here to Infinity: Obsessing With the Magic of Primes, George Johnson, NYTimes, 02/09/03
  39. Synergistic Interaction Between Adenosine A2A And Glutamate mGlu5 Receptors: Implications For Striatal Neuronal Function Sergi Ferre, Marzena Karcz-Kubicha, Bruce T. Hope, Patrizia Popoli, Javier Burgueno, M. Angeles Gutierrez, Vicent Casado, Kjell Fuxe, Steven R. Goldberg, Carme Lluis, Rafael Franco, Francisco Ciruela, PNAS 2002;99 11940-11945
  40. Policy Makers Hone Debate: When to Hold, When to Fold, Richard W. Stevenson, NYTimes, 02/09/03, Central bankers, government officials and economists at the Federal Reserve's annual retreat agreed on one thing: economic policy has little success when used to fine tune the economy.
  41. So Sweet a Taste, So Complex an Aroma, Amanda Hesser, NYTimes, 02/09/04, A CLASSIC riesling is the kind of wine that leaves you wanting to do nothing more than swirl it around in its glass, marvel at its pretty pale-straw color and wonder how such a spare-looking wine can have so much aroma. There might be passion fruit, melon, apricots, yeast, minerals and coriander, all mingling and emerging from its bouquet.
  42. Human Evolution: Can Selection Explain the Presbyterians?, Ruse, Michael, Science 2002 297: 1479, Book review of: Darwin's Cathedral Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, David Sloan Wilson, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002

 

20.2 Coming and Ongoing Webcasts

  1. New:  7th Experimental Chaos Conference, San Diego, Ca, 02/08/26-29, Video/Audio Report
  2. Seventh International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, Edinburgh, UK, 02/08/04-11, Video/Audio Reports
  3. New: The Technology Frontier, Gemini Ernst & Young Center for Business Innovation, 02/09/18
  4. Brookings Report Urges Congress to Revise President Bush's Homeland Security Proposal, A Brookings Press Briefing, 02/07/15, Event Video
  5. International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS2002), Nashua, NH, 02/06/09-14 (video + mp3 downloadable audio)
  6. 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
  7. 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.
  8. Dean LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since February 1998

 

20.3 Conference Announcements 

  1. Self-Organisation and Evolution of Social Behaviour, Monte Verità, Switzerland, 02/09/08-13
  2. Complex Systems (CS02) Complexity with Agent-Based Modeling, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan, 02/09/10-12
  3. Complexity: A New Perspective For The NHS And Its Partners, U of Exeter, 02/09/17-19
  4. 3rd Intl NAISO Symposium on Engineering Of Intelligent Systems (EIS 20020), Malaga, Spain, 02/09/24-27
  5. Seminar on Non-equilibrium Phenomena and Phase Transitions in Complex Systems, Avila, Spain, 02/09/24-28.
  6. ACRI 2002, 5th Intl Conf on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, Geneva, Switzerland, 02/10/09-11 
  7. Healthy Organizations & Leadership: What We Can Learn From Complexity Science, Flemington, NJ, 02/09/ 27-28
  8. Unleashing the Storyteller Within: Tapping a New Leadership Skill, PlexusInstitute.org, Maine
  9. 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
  10. Achieve Breakthrough Results by Re-Thinking and Updating Your Organization's "Reason for Being", Santa Fe Associates, NM
  11. 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. 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. 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. 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium Series, Computational Synthesis: From Basic Building Blocks To High Level Functionality, Stanford, 03/03/24-27
  23. Uncertainty and Surprise: Questions on Working with the Unexpected, U. of Texas at Austin, Texas USA
  24. Reverse Engineering Of The Giant Muscle Protein Titin, Hongbin Li, Wolfgang A. Linke, Andres F. Oberhauser, Mariano Carrion-Vazquez, Jason G. Kerkvliet, Hui Lu, Piotr E. Marszalek, Julio M. Fernandez, Nature 418, 998 - 1002 (2002); doi:10.1038/nature00938

 

20.4 Biodiversity Learning Center, Online Course Announcement

Summary: Discover a wealth of information about the relationship between the global economy and the environment in the special learning center "Exploring Biodiversity." With dozens of new features, free seminars and online courses illuminating the complex issues related to biodiversity, this learning center is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in learning about the interconnectedness of earth's diverse ecosystems and populations, and economic strategies to protect limited resources through sustainable development.

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