Francis Heylighen

The present course intends to answer the question of what it means to be human. This question has traditionally been the subject of a domain known as “philosophical anthropology”. Anthropology is the science that studies humans—just as entomology studies insects, and herpetology studies reptiles. It does this by carefully observing the physical, social and cultural properties that characterize human beings. This includes the evolution of humans out of their ape-like ancestors. It also includes the behaviors that different groups of humans exhibit in their more “natural state”, for example as hunter-gatherers living in the rainforest as yet unaffected by our highly technological civilization. Philosophical anthropology complements these concrete observations and the resulting theories by studying what has been called the “human condition”. This concerns more existential questions about the meaning of human life:
Ø Who are we?
Ø What are we living for?
Ø What is our fundamental human nature?
Ø What are human values?
Ø What sets humans apart from other beings?

Read the full book at: researchportal.vub.be

Dapp, Marcus M., Helbing, Dirk, Klauser, Stefan (Eds.)

This Open Access book outlines ideas for a novel, scalable and, above all, sustainable financial system.

We all know that today’s global markets are unsustainable and global governance is not effective enough. Given this situation, could one boost smart human coordination, sustainability and resilience by tweaking society at its core: the monetary system? A Computational Social Science team at ETH Zürich has indeed worked on a concept and little demonstrator for a new financial system, called “Finance 4.0” or just “FIN4”, which combines blockchain technology with the Internet of Things (“IoT”).

What if communities could reward sustainable actions by issuing their own money (“tokens”)? Would people behave differently, when various externalities became visible and were actionable through cryptographic tokens? Could a novel, participatory, multi-dimensional financial system be created? Could it be run by the people for the people and lead to more societal resilience than today’s financial system (which is effectively one-dimensional due to its almost frictionless exchange)? How could one manage such a system in an ethical and democratic way?

This book presents some early attempts in a nascent field, but provides a fresh view on what cryptoeconomic systems could do for us, for a circular economy, and for scalable, sustainable action.

Read the full book at: www.springer.com

Hermann Haken, Juval Portugali

Four concepts make the title of this book: Synergetic cities which is a view on cites as complex systems from the perspective of Haken’s theory of synergetics; information, which is a view on cities as complex systems commencing from the perspective of information theory. Next come steady state and phase transition which are two central aspects of complex systems in general and of cities as complex systems. Our aim is to introduce and develop the above four notions and then to discuss their implication to three issues that stand at the core of current discourse on cities as complex systems: urban allometery (or scaling) and smart cities—both attract special attention in the discourse on cities of the last two decades, as part of the attempt to transform the study of cities into a science. The third issue, city planning, attempts to adapt the process of planning to the understanding, and reality, of cities as complex, adaptive self-organizing systems.

Book at: link.springer.com

Milena Oehlers and Benjamin Fabian

Mathematics 2021, 9(8), 895

Research on the robustness of networks, and in particular the Internet, has gained critical importance in recent decades because more and more individuals, societies and firms rely on this global network infrastructure for communication, knowledge transfer, business processes and e-commerce. In particular, modeling the structure of the Internet has inspired several novel graph metrics for assessing important topological robustness features of large complex networks. This survey provides a comparative overview of these metrics, presents their strengths and limitations for analyzing the robustness of the Internet topology, and outlines a conceptual tool set in order to facilitate their future adoption by Internet research and practice but also other areas of network science.

Read the full article at: www.mdpi.com

Urban informatics is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding, managing, and designing the city using systematic theories and methods based on new information technologies. Integrating urban science, geomatics, and informatics, urban informatics is a particularly timely way of fusing many interdisciplinary perspectives in studying city systems. This edited book aims to meet the urgent need for works that systematically introduce the principles and technologies of urban informatics. The book gathers over 40 world-leading research teams from a wide range of disciplines, who provide comprehensive reviews of the state of the art and the latest research achievements in their various areas of urban informatics. The book is organized into six parts, respectively covering the conceptual and theoretical basis of urban informatics, urban systems and applications, urban sensing, urban big data infrastructure, urban computing, and prospects for the future of urban informatics. 

Open Access Book at: link.springer.com