COVID-19 is the virus that proved the fragility of the world. It took only the simplest form of life to shake the connectivity and dependency of society. This book is a real-time record and recommendation from a community of complexity scientists reacting to the pandemic. Through nontechnical articles, interviews, and discussions spanning the early days of the pandemic through the fall of 2021, researchers seek ways to stay responsive to complexity when every force conspires toward simplicity. The Complex Alternative encompasses immunology, epidemiology, psychology, inequality, and collapse. It is an effort to preserve perspective at a time when partiality seeks dominion.

Edited by David C. Krakauer and Geoffrey West, this book features the thoughts of more than sixty members of the Santa Fe Institute’s research community on the future of complexity science and the broader significance of science in the twenty-first century.

More at: www.sfipress.org

Presents current theoretical, empirical, and operational efforts tackling corruption studies.
Introduces the relevance of evidence-based and network approaches to anticorruption.
Discusses the best ways to convert the obtained knowledge into public policy.

More at: link.springer.com

Written by some of the founders of complexity theory and complexity theories of cities (CTC), this Handbook expertly guides the reader through over forty years of intertwined developments: the emergence of general theories of complex self-organized systems and the consequent emergence of CTC. 

Examining studies from the end of 1970 through to the current leading approach to urbanism, planning and design, the book provides an up-to-date snapshot of CTC. Insightful chapters are split into five parts covering the early foundations of the topic, the evolution of towns and cities and urban complexity, the links between complexity, languages and cities, modelling traffic and parking in cities, and urban planning and design. The Handbook on Cities and Complexity concludes with the contributors’ personal statements on their observations of COVID-19’s impact upon global cities.
 
This book will be an invaluable resource for those researching cities and complexity and also for scholars of urban studies, planning, physics, mathematics, AI, and architecture.

More at: www.e-elgar.com

Edited by Jitka Čejková, Silvia Holler, Lisa Soros, Olaf Witkowski

MIT Press

This volume contains the proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE 2021) which was originally scheduled to be held in Prague (Czech Republic) 19 – 23 July 2021, but because of the covid-19 pandemic and its repercussions, is being held virtually only. (https://2021.alife.org/). The International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALIFE) and the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) have been the major meetings of the artificial life (ALife) research community since 1987 and 1991, respectively. Currently, these scientific gatherings are supported by the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL) – a democratic, international, professional society dedicated to promoting scientific research and education relating to artificial life, including sponsoring this conference annually, publishing scientific journals and proceedings, and maintaining web sites related to artificial life.

Read the full proceedings at: direct.mit.edu

Most of us are intuitively familiar with small social systems, such as families and soccer teams. Surprisingly, though, most of us are unaware of how complex these systems are or of the fact that they have a unique character distinguishing them from both populations and individuals. The current manuscript, which emerged from high-level scientific publications on the subject, aims to bridge this gap in our understanding of small social systems. The book aims to explain, illustrate, and model the unique and fascinating nature of small (social) systems by relying on deep scientific foundations and by using examples from sport, movies, music, and the martial arts. To support its friendly exposition of challenging scientific ideas, the book also discusses entertaining questions such as (1) why inviting your mother-in-law to dinner might be a challenging event, for reasons you have never considered; (2) why soccer teams should be messy in order to win; (3) why Nazis are deeply wrong in their understanding of the importance of entropy; and (4) why “panda fighters” failed in the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship).

More at: www.springer.com