Networking the complexity community since 1999
The 2021 GESDA Science Breakthrough Radar provides an overview of science trends and breakthrough predictions at 5, 10 and 25 years in 24 science and technology areas, a synthesis of the related fundamental debates in society, and an exploration of opportunities for concerted action through initial contributions on the implications for international affairs, global challenges, and the SDGs.
Read the full article at: radar.gesda.global
16, 17, 18, 19, 22 (+23) November 2021, 11:00am – 06:00pm (GMT)
Online | SECOND CALL for applications >> until 14 October 2021
This CES Winter School is a 2nd Edition of the previously named “Sustainable development, complexity and change: thinking and practices for the SDG and other objectives” CES Winter School, held on December 2020. It is based on a logic of deep interdisciplinarity, oriented towards promoting productive, collaborative, critical and creative dialogues between different disciplines and modes of thinking, between theory and research and the practices that “in the real world” enact and realise, critique or present alternative or complementary proposals to current global challenges.
While the international political agenda is guided by the concept of sustainable development, both the concept and it’s expression, configured in the 17 SDG and their indicators, remain under discussion, raising issues about their adequacy to places, contexts and specific problems, about the practices that sustain the concept of sustainable development and the degree of congruence between the thinking underlying such political agendas, the complexity of the world and the actions informed by such thinking. The question needs to be raised that an insufficient recognition of the complexity of the problems that sustain local and global policies and the realities they aim to dress, as well as of the need to develop modes of thinking and practices congruent with such complexity, may prevent or limit the success of this international agenda, even leading, in unpredictable ways, to the configurations of new, more or less preferred or unwanted realities.
In this Winter School, we propose to address key global challenges, exploring a variety of critical, alternative and complementary views on how to address their complexity. As such, the School will combine lectures/seminars and guided and creative moments of group discussion aimed at the integration of knowledge and experiences towards the production of new ideas and projects.
More at: ces.uc.pt
Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those laws. To hold such a position in a principled way, it’s important to have a clear understanding of “emergence” and when it happens. Anil Seth is a leading researcher in the neuroscience of consciousness, who has also done foundational work (often in collaboration with Lionel Barnett) on what emergence means. We talk about information theory, entropy, and what they have to do with how things emerge.
Read the full article at: www.preposterousuniverse.com
This year’s Laureates – David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens – have provided us with new insights about the labour market and shown what conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments. Their approach has spread to other fields and revolutionised empirical research.
Many of the big questions in the social sciences deal with cause and effect. How does immigration affect pay and employment levels? How does a longer education affect someone’s future income? These questions are difficult to answer because we have nothing to use as a comparison. We do not know what would have happened if there had been less immigration or if that person had not continued studying.
However, this year’s Laureates have shown that it is possible to answer these and similar questions using natural experiments. The key is to use situations in which chance events or policy changes result in groups of people being treated differently, in a way that resembles clinical trials in medicine.
Using natural experiments, David Card has analysed the labour market effects of minimum wages, immigration and education. His studies from the early 1990s challenged conventional wisdom, leading to new analyses and additional insights. The results showed, among other things, that increasing the minimum wage does not necessarily lead to fewer jobs. We now know that the incomes of people who were born in a country can benefit from new immigration, while people who immigrated at an earlier time risk being negatively affected. We have also realised that resources in schools are far more important for students’ future labour market success than was previously thought.
Data from a natural experiment are difficult to interpret, however. For example, extending compulsory education by a year for one group of students (but not another) will not affect everyone in that group in the same way. Some students would have kept studying anyway and, for them, the value of education is often not representative of the entire group. So, is it even possible to draw any conclusions about the effect of an extra year in school? In the mid-1990s, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens solved this methodological problem, demonstrating how precise conclusions about cause and effect can be drawn from natural experiments.
“Card’s studies of core questions for society and Angrist and Imbens’ methodological contributions have shown that natural experiments are a rich source of knowledge. Their research has substantially improved our ability to answer key causal questions, which has been of great benefit to society,” says Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Economic Sciences Prize Committee.
Read the full article at: www.nobelprize.org
Observations from orbital spacecraft have shown that Jezero crater, Mars, contains a prominent fan-shaped body of sedimentary rock deposited at its western margin. The Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater in February 2021. We analyze images taken by the rover in the three months after landing. The fan has outcrop faces that were invisible from orbit, which record the hydrological evolution of Jezero crater. We interpret the presence of inclined strata in these outcrops as evidence of deltas that advanced into a lake. In contrast, the uppermost fan strata are composed of boulder conglomerates, which imply deposition by episodic high-energy floods. This sedimentary succession indicates a transition, from a sustained hydrologic activity in a persistent lake environment, to highly energetic short-duration fluvial flows.
Read the full article at: www.science.org
