WHY CITIES KEEP GROWING, CORPORATIONS AND PEOPLE ALWAYS DIE, AND LIFE GETS FASTER. This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them. Well, Google is a bit of an exception, because it still tolerates some of that. But most companies start out probably with some of that buzz. But the data indicates that at about 50 employees to a hundred that buzz starts to stop. A company that was more multi dimensional, more evolved, becomes uni dimensional. Indeed, if you go to General Motors or you go to American Airlines or you go to Goldman Sachs, you don't see crazy people. It's not surprising to learn that when manufacturing companies are on a down turn, they decrease research and development, and in fact in some cases, do actually get rid of it, thinking this is "oh, we can get that back in two years we'll be back on track.
" Well, this kind of thinking kills them. Read on. Well, you find quite the contrary. Inside the Artificial Universe That Creates Itself. Every particle in the universe is accounted for. The precise shape and position of every blade of grass on every planet has been calculated. Every snowflake and every raindrop has been numbered. On the screen before us, mountains rise sharply and erode into gently rolling hills, before finally subsiding into desert. Millions of years pass in an instant. Here, in a dim room half an hour south of London, a tribe of programmers sit bowed at their computers, creating a vast digital cosmos. Or rather, through the science of procedural generation, they are making a program that allows a universe to create itself. The ambitious project will be released as a video game this June under the title No Man’s Sky. “The physics of every other game—it’s faked,” the chief architect Sean Murray explained. “With us,” Murray continued, “when you're on a planet, you can see as far as the curvature of that planet.
On the monitor before us, cryptic fragments of source code flash by. Emergence of scale-free characteristics in socio-ecological systems with bounded rationality : Scientific Reports. Although there have been attempts to model the rationality of players, they have mostly been concerned with proposing a rationality model that identifies the rationality as a constant for all players under a particular strategic decision making context. For example, Wolpert17 proposed a model to derive the rationality of an abstract player by solving the Maxent (maximum entropy) Lagrangians that model the probability distribution of a human player as a Boltzmann distribution. However, as the cognitive hierarchical model21 and related empirical observations suggest, rationality of players in a population is typically distributed in a heterogeneous distribution instead of all players having the same level of rationality for a particular strategic decision making environment.
A social-interaction based modelling of bounded rationality would account for this heterogeneity. and range of possible rationality values of the rationality parameter. Analysis and Results Full size image (318 KB) or . Uk.businessinsider. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave. Ex Machina and AI. I saw Ex Machina this weekend. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, mild spoiler alert – I will try to avoid any major reveals, but I will be discussing major aspects of the movie. First, it’s an excellent film. I highly recommend it.
It was both entertaining and thought provoking. He also manages to weave in a fairly deep commentary on the nature of consciousness and creativity, the nature of AI, and all with a subtext of oppression, misogyny and male-female relationships. What I want to focus on for the rest of this article, however, is his handling of the topic of consciousness and AI. Another example is taken from philosophy, that of the scientist who lives in a black-and-white environment, but studies everything about color. Obviously the film surrounds an artificially intelligent android. For background, the Turing test was devised by Alan Turing. In the film, however, early on the creator of the AI simply stipulates that his AI will pass the Turing test. As I wrote previously: Maybe the System Isn't the Solution - Maybe It's the Problem. I read a lot. It takes discipline; I set aside at least an hour every single day for reading.
I read both fiction and non-fiction, but as I've gotten older I've definitely trended more towards non-fiction. Even the most speculative of fiction authors often have a hard time matching the amazing stuff I find in the news every day. I think it's one of the reasons that one of my favorite fiction authors, William Gibson, has transitioned from writing about the near future to writing about the recent past. Much my non-fiction choices have been in the realms of economics, and how and why complex systems fail.
Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies, Princeton University Press, 1999 On June 1, 1974 in Flixborough England, a chemical plant that manufactured a component of nylon exploded. This is one of the many catastrophic accidents that Perrow describes in detail in his book. Confronted with ambiguous signals, the safest reality was constructed. How Can the Study of Complexity Transform Our Understanding of the World? In 1894, the physicist and Nobel laureate Albert Michelson declared that science was almost finished; the human race was within a hair’s breadth of understanding everything: It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have now been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.
Bold and heady predictions like this often seem destined to topple, and, to be sure, the world of physics was soon shaken by the revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics. But as the 20th century unfolded, it turned out to be the phenomena closest to our own human scale— biology, social science, economics, politics, among others—that have most notably eluded explanation by any grand principles. The deeper we dig into the workings of ourselves and our society, the more unexpected complexity we find. What is Complexity? Transforming Our Understanding More is Different 1. 2.
Five_labs_new_app_by_h_andrew_schwartz_lets_you_see_which_facebook_friends. Photo by Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images This post originally appeared in Business Insider. Last year, a group of University of Pennsylvania researchers found an entirely different way to analyze human personality by analyzing Facebook status updates of 75,000 volunteers. Now there's an app that allows you to compare your Facebook personality with that of your friends and public figures. Consumer technology company Five built the new app using an artificial intelligence method designed by H.
"We trained the model by following a similar process of finding thousands of people to take personality tests while have their Facebook wall posts scanned," Five co-founder Nikita Bier told Business Insider. The results are endlessly fascinating. You can see your personality profile based on the Big Five traits and find friends who are most like you: Five Labs And then see the comparison: Here's my comparison to Bill Gates: And here is how I match up to my twin brother: University of Pennsylvania.
Social Media Analysis Reveals The Complexities Of Syrian Conflict. Social media has become a fundamental tool of social change all over the world. Nowhere is this more evident than the middle east. Platforms such as Twitter and Youtube played a major role in the Arab Spring, the civil uprisings in 2010 that spread from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to Yemen and beyond. But the event most heavily covered by social media is the civil war in Syria, which has now raged for almost three year. The conflict has been extensively recorded on videos which are regularly uploaded to YouTube and then tweeted around the world. All sides in the conflict seem to be engaged with numerous social media accounts.
So an interesting question is to what extent does social media activity reflect the situation on the ground. These guys studied over 600 Twitter and YouTube accounts that post or link to content related to the Syrian conflict. The results reveal 16 separate communities which together form four clearly aligned groups. And the volume of response was different too. Weaver.pdf - Weaver.pdf. Weaver-1947b.htm - WEAVER1947.pdf. Telecommunications data show civic dividing lines in major countries. Many residents of Britain, Italy, and Belgium imagine there to be a kind of north-south divide in their countries, marking a barrier between different social groups and regional characteristics. Now a new study by MIT researchers reveals that such divides can be seen in the patterns of communication in those countries and others.
Telecommunications data in Britain, for instance, show that only about 9.5 percent of communications cross a line about 100 miles north of London. In Italy, only 7.8 percent of communications cross a line roughly along the northern border of the Emilio-Romagna region, above which lie the industrial and commercial metropolises of Milan and Turin. These invisible borders, the researchers say, help us grasp the social, civic, and commercial interactions that exist in contemporary nations, and may be of use to government officials and other policy experts. Mapping the linguistic divide. The Mathematical Shape of Big Science Data. Simon DeDeo, a research fellow in applied mathematics and complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute, had a problem. He was collaborating on a new project analyzing 300 years’ worth of data from the archives of London’s Old Bailey, the central criminal court of England and Wales. Granted, there was clean data in the usual straightforward Excel spreadsheet format, including such variables as indictment, verdict, and sentence for each case.
But there were also full court transcripts, containing some 10 million words recorded during just under 200,000 trials. Today’s big data is noisy, unstructured, and dynamic. “How the hell do you analyze that data?” “In physics, you typically have one kind of data and you know the system really well,” said DeDeo. DeDeo is not the only researcher grapping with these challenges. Peter DaSilva for Quanta Magazine Gunnar Carlsson, a mathematician at Stanford University, uses topological data analysis to find structure in complex, unstructured data sets. Ayasdi. In Big Science, Imagining Data Without Division. Seven years ago, when David Schimel was asked to design an ambitious data project called the National Ecological Observatory Network, it was little more than a National Science Foundation grant. There was no formal organization, no employees, no detailed science plan.
Emboldened by advances in remote sensing, data storage and computing power, NEON sought answers to the biggest question in ecology: How do global climate change, land use and biodiversity influence natural and managed ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole? “We don’t understand that very well,” Schimel said. Splitting his time at first between the new project and his role as a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Schimel said he was surprised by the magnitude of the challenge, by the “sheer number of different measurements required to address the key science questions.” Peter DaSilva for Quanta Magazine In 2007, Schimel became NEON’s chief scientist and first full-time employee. NEON and NSF. Innovation, economics, and messy, complex truths. Andy Kessler, whose take on things I generally like, recently wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal called, “Robots, 3-D Printers and Other Looming Innovations.”
In it he posed the question of whether the internet and other disruptive trends have destroyed more jobs than they’ve created. Could innovation actually be fueling the stubborn unemployment that has persisted in much of the country? But Kessler was merely tossing some rhetorical “chum” into the waters to bait naysaying Luddites. Sure, people are hurting now, Kessler noted, and probably more jobs have been destroyed than created, but eventually things will more than even out, so suck it up! Kessler then delivered his list of future job creating “game changers” with the certitude of a preacher sermonizing to his flock (it’s WSJ, after all).
Reassessing the calculus of ‘value’ There is a Koan that is running through my head. One answer is that price is absolute, and that the consumer always wins when the price is lower. What Facebook Knows. Photographs by Leah Fasten If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world. It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the company’s servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior. Some of your personal information is probably part of it. And yet, even as Facebook has embedded itself into modern life, it hasn’t actually done that much with what it knows about us.
Now that the company has gone public, the pressure to develop new sources of profit (see “The Facebook Fallacy”) is likely to force it to do more with its hoard of information. Contagious Information Social Engineering This is just the beginning. Doubling Data Mining for Gold. Defining universal patterns in the emergence of complex societies. Jeremy Sabloff on Emergence of Complex Societies Project Highlights: October 2013 The rise of the state is a key marker in the evolution of human society.
States typically emerged when one chiefdom (amid a competing set of chiefdoms) achieved a greater and more effective level of organization. Despite the presence of similar conditions, some states rose and flourished while some advanced chiefdoms never passed the threshold into statehood. Why states emerged in some places and not others, why they arose independently in six places around the world starting about 5,000 years ago, and why their rise was usually associated with the growth of cities, are fascinating questions for anthropologists.
In this project, scholars will build a database of all available quantitative archaeological information on early state formation and development. The Santa Fe Institute thanks the John Templeton Foundation for its generous support of this work. Catastrophic-shock-pandemic2. WHY CITIES KEEPING GROWING, CORPORATIONS AND PEOPLE ALWAYS DIE, AND LIFE GETS FASTER. This is in complete contrast to companies. The Google boys in the back garage so to speak with ideas of the search engine, were no doubt promoting all kinds of crazy ideas and maybe having even crazy people around them. Well, Google is a bit of an exception, because it still tolerates some of that. But most companies start out probably with some of that buzz. But the data indicates that at about 50 employees to a hundred that buzz starts to stop. Indeed, if you go to General Motors or you go to American Airlines or you go to Goldman Sachs, you don't see crazy people.
It's not surprising to learn that when manufacturing companies are on a down turn, they decrease research and development, and in fact in some cases, do actually get rid of it, thinking this is "oh, we can get that back in two years we'll be back on track. " Well, this kind of thinking kills them. Read on. [Geoffrey West:] I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, Quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.