“The Human Network”  is now available:   https://web.stanford.edu/~jacksonm/books.html#book2

It discusses how a handful of simple and quantifiable features of human networks yield enormous insight into why we behave the way we do.   Two threads are interwoven: why human networks have special features, and how those features determine our power, opinions, opportunities, behaviors, and accomplishments.  Some of the topics included are:  the different ways in which a person’s position in a network determines their influence;  which systematic errors we make when forming opinions based on what we learn from our friends; how financial contagions work and why are they different from the spread of a flu; how splits in our social networks feed inequality, immobility, and polarization; and how network patterns of trade and globalization are changing international conflict and wars.

The book is non-technical, with no equations but many pictures, and is full of rich examples and cases that illustrate the points.  It is not only useful for explaining network science to a lay audience, but also as a supplement for a course on networks.

Source: web.stanford.edu

This textbook explores the interdisciplinary field of complex systems theory and how it relates to practical questions and issues. The text is interspersed with both philosophical and quantitative arguments, and each chapter ends with questions and prompts that help readers make mor

Source: www.springer.com

[…] as The Gendered Brain reveals, conclusive findings about sex-linked brain differences have failed to materialize. Beyond the “missing five ounces” of female brain — gloated about since the nineteenth century — modern neuroscientists have identified no decisive, category-defining differences between the brains of men and women. In women’s brains, language-processing is not spread any more evenly across the hemispheres than it is in men’s, as a small 1995 Nature study proclaimed but a large 2008 meta-analysis disproved (B. A. Shaywitz et al. Nature 373, 607–609 (1995) and I. E. Sommer et al. Brain Res. 1206, 76–88; 2008). Brain size increases with body size, and certain features, such as the ratio of grey to white matter or the cross-sectional area of a nerve tract called the corpus callosum, scale slightly non-linearly with brain size. But these are differences in degree, not kind. As Rippon notes, they are also seen when we compare small-headed men to large-headed women, and have no relationship to differences in hobbies or take-home pay.

The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters The Myth Of The Female Brain. Gina Rippon The Bodley Head (2019)

Source: www.nature.com

This book provides the basis of a formal language and explores its possibilities in the characterization of multiplex networks. Armed with the formalism developed, the authors define structural metrics for multiplex networks. A methodology to generalize monoplex structural metrics to multiplex networks is also presented so that the reader will be able to generalize other metrics of interest in a systematic way. Therefore, this book will serve as a guide for the theoretical development of new multiplex metrics.

Furthermore, this Brief describes the spectral properties of these networks in relation to concepts from algebraic graph theory and the theory of matrix polynomials. The text is rounded off by analyzing the different structural transitions present in multiplex systems as well as by a brief overview of some representative dynamical processes.

Multiplex Networks will appeal to students, researchers, and professionals within the fields of network science, graph theory, and data science.

Multiplex Networks: Basic Formalism and Structural Properties (SpringerBriefs in Complexity)
by Emanuele Cozzo, Guilherme Ferraz de Arruda, Francisco Aparecido Rodrigues, Yamir Moreno

Source: www.amazon.com

Viruses are everywhere, infecting all sorts of living organisms, from the tiniest bacteria to the largest mammals. Many are harmful parasites, but viruses also play a major role as drivers of our evolution as a species and are essential regulators of the composition and complexity of ecosystems on a global scale. This concise book draws on complex systems theory to provide a fresh look at viral origins, populations, and evolution, and the coevolutionary dynamics of viruses and their hosts.

New viruses continue to emerge that threaten people, crops, and farm animals. Viruses constantly evade our immune systems, and antiviral therapies and vaccination campaigns can be powerless against them. These unique characteristics of virus biology are a consequence of their tremendous evolutionary potential, which enables viruses to quickly adapt to any environmental challenge. Ricard Solé and Santiago Elena present a unified framework for understanding viruses as complex adaptive systems. They show how the application of complex systems theory to viral dynamics has provided new insights into the development of AIDS in patients infected with HIV-1, the emergence of new antigenic variants of the influenza A virus, and other cutting-edge advances.

Essential reading for biologists, physicists, and mathematicians interested in complexity, Viruses as Complex Adaptive Systems also extends the analogy of viruses to the evolution of other replicators such as computer viruses, cancer, and languages.

Source: www.amazon.com