Advancements in science and technology take place on a global scale without much consideration of the exact implications that they may essentially have on the species or our planet. Over the last few decades, things are moving very fast and not always in a good way. The climate of the planet is changing drastically. Ice caps are melting faster than ever. Known animal species around the world are declining at rates faster than ever previously known in recorded history. We humans, might have intelligent individuals amidst us. However, collectively, to any external observer, we would perhaps seem to act more like mindless scavengers stripping the planet of its resources faster than she can ever replenish them. And this all seems to be intrinsically linked with our seemingly insatiable “collective” urge to satisfy immediate needs. So, while the technological revolution has greatly benefited humankind, our continual reliance on technology also has considerable collateral effects on the planet.

 

Why teach modeling & simulation in schools?
Muaz A. Niazi and Anatoly Temkin
Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling20175:7
https://doi.org/10.1186/s40294-017-0046-y

Source: casmodeling.springeropen.com

Synergy, emerges from synchronized reciprocal positive feedback loops between a network of diverse actors. For this process to proceed, compatible information from different sources synchronically coordinates the actions of the actors resulting in a nonlinear increase in the useful work or potential energy the system can manage. In contrast noise is produced when incompatible information is mixed. This synergy produced from the coordination of different agents achieves non-linear gains in energy and/or information that are greater than the sum of the parts. The final product of new synergies is an increase in individual autonomy of an organism that achieves increased emancipation from the environment with increases in productivity, efficiency, capacity for flexibility, self-regulation and self-control of behavior through a synchronized division of ever more specialized labor. Synergistic is the interdisciplinary science explaining the formation and self-organization of patterns and structures in partially open systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Understanding the mechanisms that produce synergy helps to increase success rates in everyday life, in business, in science, in economics and in increasing, yet to named areas. A mechanism discovered by biological evolution favoring the achievement of synergy in addition to division of labor is assortation: the combination of similar or compatible agents or information, to reduce the chances of noisy mismatches. Empirical evidence in many domains show that assortative information matching increases the probability of achieving synergy.The roots of synergy are the features of that promote an increase the information content or negentropy of the system, and its power to produce useful work.

 

The thermodynamic roots of synergy and its impact on society

Klaus Jaffe

Source: arxiv.org

It is a long-standing question whether human sexual and reproductive cycles are affected predominantly by biology or culture. The literature is mixed with respect to whether biological or cultural factors best explain the reproduction cycle phenomenon, with biological explanations dominating the argument. The biological hypothesis proposes that human reproductive cycles are an adaptation to the seasonal cycles caused by hemisphere positioning, while the cultural hypothesis proposes that conception dates vary mostly due to cultural factors, such as vacation schedule or religious holidays. However, for many countries, common records used to investigate these hypotheses are incomplete or unavailable, biasing existing analysis towards primarily Christian countries in the Northern Hemisphere. Here we show that interest in sex peaks sharply online during major cultural and religious celebrations, regardless of hemisphere location. This online interest, when shifted by nine months, corresponds to documented human birth cycles, even after adjusting for numerous factors such as language, season, and amount of free time due to holidays. We further show that mood, measured independently on Twitter, contains distinct collective emotions associated with those cultural celebrations, and these collective moods correlate with sex search volume outside of these holidays as well. Our results provide converging evidence that the cyclic sexual and reproductive behavior of human populations is mostly driven by culture and that this interest in sex is associated with specific emotions, characteristic of, but not limited to, major cultural and religious celebrations.

 

Human Sexual Cycles are Driven by Culture and Match Collective Moods
Ian B. Wood, Pedro Leal Varela, Johan Bollen, Luis M. Rocha, Joana Gonçalves-Sá

Source: arxiv.org

Road networks are characterised by several structural and geometrical properties. The topological structure determines partially the hierarchical arrangement of roads, but since these are networks that are spatially constrained, geometrical properties play a fundamental role in determining the network’s behaviour, characterising the influence of each of the street segments on the system. In this work, we apply percolation theory to the UK’s road network using the relative angle between street segments as the occupation probability. The appearance of the spanning cluster is marked by a phase transition, indicating that the system behaves in a critical way. Computing Shannon’s entropy of the cluster sizes, different stages of the percolation process can be discerned, and these indicate that roads integrate to the giant cluster in a hierarchical manner. This is used to construct a hierarchical index that serves to classify roads in terms of their importance. The obtained classification is in very good correspondence with the official designations of roads. This methodology hence provides a framework to consistently extract the main skeleton of an urban system and to further classify each road in terms of its hierarchical importance within the system.

 

The angular nature of road networks
Carlos Molinero, Roberto Murcio & Elsa Arcaute
Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 4312 (2017)
doi:10.1038/s41598-017-04477-z

Source: www.nature.com

How much knowledge is there in an economy? In recent years, data on the mix of products that countries export has been used to construct measures of economic complexity that estimate the knowledge available in an economy and predict future economic growth. Here we introduce a new and simpler metric of economic complexity (ECI+) that measures the total exports of an economy corrected by how difficult it is to export each product. We use data from 1973 to 2013 to compare the ability of ECI+, the Economic Complexity Index (ECI), and Fitness complexity, to predict future economic growth using 5, 10, and 20-year panels in a pooled OLS, a random effects model, and a fixed effects model. We find that ECI+ outperforms ECI and Fitness in its ability to predict economic growth and in the consistency of its estimators across most econometric specifications. On average, one standard deviation increase in ECI+ is associated with an increase in annualized growth of about 4% to 5%. We then combine ECI+ with measures of physical capital, human capital, and institutions, to find a robust model of economic growth. The ability of ECI+ to predict growth, and the value of its coefficient, is robust to these controls. Also, we find that human capital, political stability, and control of corruption; are positively associated with future economic growth, and that income is negatively associated with growth, in agreement with the traditional growth literature. Finally, we use ECI+ to generate economic growth predictions for the next 20 years and compare these predictions with the ones obtained using ECI and Fitness. These findings improve the methods available to estimate the knowledge intensity of economies and predict future economic growth.

 

Improving the Economic Complexity Index
Saleh Albeaik, Mary Kaltenberg, Mansour Alsaleh, Cesar A. Hidalgo

Source: arxiv.org