The history of efforts to reduce ‘human errors’ across workplaces and industries suggests that people (or their weaknesses) are seen as a problem to control [1, 3, 15, 16]. However, some have proposed that humans can be heroes as they can adapt and compensate for weaknesses within a system and direct it away from potential catastrophes [15]. But the existence of heroes would suggest that villains (i.e. humans who cause a disaster) exist as well [16], and that it might well be the outcome that determines which human becomes which. The purpose of this chapter is to examine if complex socio-technical systems would allow for the existence of heroes and villains, as outcomes in such systems are usually thought to be the product of interactions rather than a single factor [17]. The chapter will first examine if the properties of complex systems as suggested by Dekker et al. [18] would allow for heroes and villains to exist. These include: (a) synthesis and holism, (b) emergence, (c) foreseeability of probabilities, not certainties, (d) time-irreversibility and, (e) perpetual incompleteness and uncertainty of knowledge, before concluding with a discussion of the implications of the (non) existence of heroes and villains in complex systems for the way we conduct investigations when something goes wrong inside of those systems.

Source: link.springer.com

We put high hopes on analyzing big data, but we failed as we haven´t found solutions to the essential problems of our society. Questions like: What is the superior way of organisation of our society in the future or what’s the role of democratic principles in the future? – need to be asked and solved. In the past globalisation, optimization, administration, regulation have served us well and brought us to the level where we are but apparently as the economic situation shows now, we are in a stagnation and all those principles have reached their limits. We need new success principles. ‘I think those success principles are co-creation, co-evolution, collective intelligence, self-organization and self-regulation.’ – says Prof. Dr. Dirk Helbing, Computational Social Science, Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences, ETH/Zurich

Source: www.taskfarm.com

Basic research on biodiversity has concentrated on individual species—naming new species, studying distribution patterns, and analyzing their evolutionary relationships. Yet biodiversity is more than a collection of individual species; it is the combination of biological entities and processes that support life on Earth. To understand biodiversity we must catalog it, but we must also assess the ways species interact with other species to provide functional support for the Tree of Life. Ecological interactions may be lost well before the species involved in those interactions go extinct; their ecological functions disappear even though they remain. Here, I address the challenges in studying the functional aspects of species interactions and how basic research is helping us address the fast-paced extinction of species due to human activities.

 

Jordano P (2016) Chasing Ecological Interactions. PLoS Biol 14(9): e1002559. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002559

Source: journals.plos.org

Faced with effectively unlimited choices of how to spend their time, humans are constantly balancing a trade-off between exploitation of familiar places and exploration of new locations. Previous analyses have shown that at the daily and weekly timescales individuals are well characterized by an activity space of repeatedly visited locations. How this activity space evolves in time, however, remains unexplored. Here we analyse high-resolution spatio-temporal traces from 850 individuals participating in a 24-month experiment. We find that, although activity spaces undergo considerable changes, the number of familiar locations an individual visits at any point in time is a conserved quantity. We show that this number is similar for different individuals, revealing a substantial homogeneity of the observed population. We point out that the observed fixed size of the activity space cannot be explained in terms of time constraints, and is therefore a distinctive property of human behavior.

 

Evidence for a Conserved Quantity in Human Mobility
Laura Alessandretti, Piotr Sapiezynski, Sune Lehmann, Andrea Baronchelli

Source: arxiv.org