http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php Complexity Digest (ComDig) is a biweekly web-based scientific news-provider. It reproduces abstracts of articles related with complexity that are published in recent issues of scientific journals and other sources. These are contributed by a group of editors. ComDig is published by the UNAM and edited by Carlos Gershenson. comdighttp://feedburner.google.comThis is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site, subject to copyright and fair use. http://comdig.unam.mx/ http://comdig.unam.mx/images/logo.png http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35425 We analyze the online response of the scientific community to the preprint publication of scholarly articles. We employ a cohort of 4,606 scientific articles submitted to the preprint database arXiv.org between October 2010 and April 2011. We study three forms of reactions to these preprints: how they are downloaded on the arXiv.org site, how they are mentioned on the social media site Twitter,... arXiv 2012/02/16 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35426 News articles are extremely time sensitive by nature. There is also intense competition among news items to propagate as widely as possible. Hence, the task of predicting the popularity of news items on the social web is both interesting and challenging. Prior research has dealt with predicting eventual online popularity based on early popularity. It is most desirable, however, to predict the... arXiv 2012/02/2 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35427 The importance of collective social action in current events is manifest in the Arab Spring and Occupy movements. Electronic social media have become a pervasive channel for social interactions, and a basis of collective social response to information. The study of social media can reveal how individual actions combine to become the collective dynamics of society. Characterizing the groups that... NECSI 2012/02 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35428 The afternoon of May 6, 2010 was among the strangest in economic history. Starting at 2:42 p.m. EDT, the Dow Jones stock index fell 600 points in just 6 minutes. Its nadir represented the deepest single-day decline in that market’s 114-year history. By 3:07 p.m., the index had rebounded. The “flash crash,” as it came to be known, was big, unexpected and scary — and a new study says flash... Wired 2012/02/16 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35429 It was the holy grail of investors. The Black-Scholes equation, brainchild of economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, provided a rational way to price a financial contract when it still had time to run. It was like buying or selling a bet on a horse, halfway through the race. It opened up a new world of ever more complex investments, blossoming into a gigantic global industry. But when the... The Observer 2012/02/12 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35430 A striking feature that has attracted considerable attention is the apparent ubiquity of power-law relationships in empirical data. However, although power laws have been reported in areas ranging from finance and molecular biology to geophysics and the Internet, the data are typically insufficient and the mechanistic insights are almost always too limited for the identification of power-law... Science 2012/02/10 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35431 A capacity for culture makes humans unique Transmitting technology and skills is our strategy for survival We became ultra-social through visual theft, the stealing of others' ideas Language evolved from a need to negotiate Evolution has honed the range of our talents... Nature 2012/02/15 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35432 We introduce a new model for distributed computing performed by networks of sub-microprocessor... arXiv 2012/02/6 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35433 The Internet is one of the largest and most complex communication and information exchange networks ever created. Therefore, its dynamics and traffic unsurprisingly take on a rich variety of complex dynamics, self-organization, and other phenomena that have been researched for years. This paper is a review of the complex dynamics of Internet traffic. Departing from normal treatises, we will take... Advances in Complex Systems 2011 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35434 We describe an autonomous DNA nanorobot capable of transporting molecular payloads to cells, sensing cell surface inputs for conditional, triggered activation, and reconfiguring its structure for payload delivery. The device can be loaded with a variety of materials in a highly organized fashion and is controlled by an aptamer-encoded logic gate, enabling it to respond to a wide array of cues. We... Science 2012/02/17 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35447 About 2.5 million deaths a year, almost 4% of all deaths worldwide, are attributed to alcohol — more than the number of deaths caused by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis or malaria. Alcohol consumption is the world's third-largest risk factor for health burden; in middle-income countries, which constitute almost half of the world's population, it is the greatest risk ... Science 2012/02/16 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35435 They were slowed by annual evacuations and international concerns about their strategy, but after 2 decades they finally did it. On 8 February, the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) announced that a team of its engineers and scientists had drilled through nearly 4 kilometers of Antarctic ice to open what it called a “small window” into Lake Vostok, a dark, mysterious... Science 2012/02/17 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35436 Complex networks are often constructed by aggregating empirical data over time, such that a link represents the existence of interactions between the endpoint nodes and the link weight represents the intensity of such interactions within the aggregation time window. The resulting networks are then often considered static. More often than not, the aggregation time window is dictated by the... arXiv 2012/02/6 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35437 We investigate whether size imposes a fundamental constraint on the efficiency of small thermal machines. We analyse in detail a model of a small self-contained refrigerator consisting of three qubits. We show analytically that this system can reach the Carnot efficiency, thus demonstrating that there exists no complementarity between size and... J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 2011/12/9 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35438 The self-templating conformations of yeast prion proteins act as epigenetic elements of inheritance. Yeast prions might provide a mechanism for generating heritable phenotypic diversity that promotes survival in fluctuating environments and the evolution of new traits. However, this hypothesis is highly controversial. Prions that create new traits have not been found in wild strains, leading to... Nature 2012/02/16 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35439 Besides mathematics and physics, Newton's interests spread into alchemy and theology, and now a collection of around 7,500 of his original manuscripts, mainly on theology, have been digitised and launched online by the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. The handwritten papers show his feverish dedication to this work, which includes investigations in Hebrew and Greek as he tried to unlock... New Scientist 2012/02/17 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35440 Urban scaling relations characterizing how diverse properties of cities vary on average with their population size have recently been shown to be a general quantitative property of many urban systems around the world. (…) Here, we build a self-consistent statistical framework that characterizes the joint probability distributions of urban indicators and city population sizes across an urban... SFI Working Papers http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35441 We study two measures of the complexity of heterogeneous extended systems, taking random Boolean networks as prototypical cases. A measure defined by Shalizi et al. for cellular automata, based on a criterion for optimal statistical prediction [Shalizi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 118701 (2004)], does not distinguish between the spatial inhomogeneity of the ordered phase and the dynamical... arXiv 2012/02/9 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35442 We consider a multistate contact process (CP) in which new particles are created with probabilities that depend on the fitness of the parent particle and with mutations that occur at the time of creation. The fitness is determined by the Kauffman NK model. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that such an evolutional CP exhibits critical behaviors that differ from the basic CP. In addition, we... Phys. Rev. E 2012/02/15 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35443 This paper formally defines tipping points as a discontinuity between current and future states of a system and introduces candidate measures of when a system tips based on changes in the probability distribution over future... SFI Working Papers http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35445 We study the classic Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model for the spread of an infectious disease. In this stochastic process, there are two competing mechanism: infection and recovery. Susceptible individuals may contract the disease from infected individuals, while infected ones recover from the disease at a constant rate and are never infected again. Our focus is the behavior at the... arXiv 2012/02/8 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35414 Today, our cities are an embodiment of the complex, historical evolution of knowledge, desires and technology. Our planned and designed activities co-evolve with our aspirations, mediated by the existing technologies and social structures. The city represents the accretion and accumulation of successive layers of collective activity, structuring and being structured by other, increasingly... Springer 2012/02/04 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35415 When we think about trust, we naturally think about personal relationships or bank vaults. That's too narrow. Trust is much broader, and much more important. Nothing in society works without trust. It's the foundation of communities, commerce, democracy�everything. In this insightful and entertaining book, Schneier weaves together ideas from across the social and biological sciences to... Wiley 2012/02/14 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35416 We know that each of us is unique, but science has struggled to pinpoint where, precisely, our uniqueness resides. Is it in our genes? The structure of our brains? Our genome may determine our eye color and even aspects of our personality. But our friendships, failures, and passions also shape who we are. The question is: how? Sebastian Seung, a professor at MIT, is on a quest to discover... Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012/02/07 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35417 What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world's most influential thinkers. Their visionary answers flow from the frontiers of psychology, philosophy, economics, physics, sociology, and more. Surprising and enlightening, these insights will revolutionize the way you think about yourself and... Harper Perennial 2012/02/14 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35418 Do humans behave much like atoms? Sociophysics, which uses tools and concepts from the physics of disordered matter to describe some aspects of social and political behavior, answers in the affirmative. But advocating the use of models from the physical sciences to understand human behavior could be perceived as tantamount to dismissing the existence of human free will and also enabling... Springer 2012/02/10 http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35422 WIVACE 2012 Italian Workshop on Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation "Artificial Life, Evolution and Complexity" , Parma, Italy, 2012/02/20-21 3rd Workshop on Complex Networks, Melbourne, Florida, USA, 2012/03/7-9 evostar - the main european events on evolutionary computation eurogp, evocop, evobio, evomusart and evoapplications, Málaga, Spain, 2012/03/11-13 9th... http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35423 Complexity Digest videos and Webcast Archive. Lakeside Labs videos. FuturICT videos. Brain-Mind Institute webinars IFISC@uib.es seminars. ASSYST Digital Library. TED Talks. Edge Videos CERN Webcast Service. Dean LeBaron's Video Casts.... http://comdig.unam.mx/index.php?id_issue=2012.04#35424 ASSYSTComplexity One of the main goals of the ASSYST Coordination Action is to promote Complex Systems for Socially Intelligent ICT (COSI-ICT) and, more generally, Complex Systems (CS) Science in Europe and Worldwide. We do this by communicating widely with scientists, policy makers, and business people, and by showcasing success stories of CS applications. Job openings in Complex Systems ...