3-Oct-2008
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(...) the system was vulnerable because of intricate financial contracts known as credit derivatives, which insure debt holders against default. They are fashioned privately and beyond the ken of regulators - sometimes even beyond the understanding of executives peddling them.
Originally intended to diminish risk and spread prosperity, these inventions instead magnified the impact of bad mortgages like the ones that felled Bear Stearns and Lehman and now threaten the entire economy.
Neuroeconomists Camerer et al. recently predicted that "We will eventually be able to replace the simple mathematical ideas that have been used in economics with more neurally-detailed descriptions" (2). By contrast, economic theorists Gul and Pesendorfer maintain that neuroscience evidence is irrelevant to economics because "the latter makes no assumptions and draws no conclusions about the physiology of the brain" (3). Limited to current practice in economics, the Gul-Pesendorfer assertion is correct. In a standard economic model, a decision-maker is confronted with several options, and the purpose of the exercise is to predict which one the subject will select.
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roma1.infn.it, A. Baldassarri, V. D. P. Servedio, V. Loreto, DOI: 10.1142/S0219525908001817, Advances in Complex Systems, Aug. 2008, Developing such a strategy poses a significant challenge because of the complex nature of innovation. Innovation is the creation of something new - a good or a service, a way to deliver goods or services, an organizational or management structure - or the capturing of new markets. Knowledge is an important ingredient of innovation. (...) However, in a world of modularity and flexible platforms for technologies and practices, users are more able to improve and augment their systems, creating a web of knowledge that can change the behaviour of other users or of suppliers. This is a complex process, a system of innovation.
yahoo.co.in
northwestern.edu, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2008.07.001, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Oct. 2008, online 2008/08/27, The wide diffusion of writing required standardization to facilitate mutual intelligibility. Will increasingly broad dissemination of spoken language accelerate the demise of regional dialects and less widely spoken languages? Written contracts today have greater legal standing than verbal ones. Will that distinction persist in a world in which spoken and written words have equal permanence? How can we harness this new technology to accelerate access to new knowledge, and what would be the implications of the resulting compression of innovation cycles?
Moving the landmarks nearer to or farther away from each other did not fool the bees, showing that they were not relying on distance, but were counting the number of landmarks before the food. Changing landmarks from stripes to spots had no effect either, suggesting that bees can use numbers in an abstract way.
yahoo.co.in
yahoo.co.inTherefore, impaired remyelination was associated with an age-dependent loss of 'epigenetic memory'. (...)
A closer look revealed that the impaired remyelination in older mice did not result from various possible effects - an altered inflammatory response, for example, (...). Rather, genes encoding inhibitory transcription factors (...) and factors that promote stem-cell activity (...) were transcribed for much longer than normally seen in remyelination.
"I think it's incredible how well off they are," says Perls. Although almost half of the supers had osteoporosis and almost 90% had cataracts, 41% of them either lived on their own or required only minimal help with tasks such as preparing food, dressing, and bathing. Cardiovascular disease, the leading killer in developed countries, was rare among supercentenarians--only 6% had suffered heart attacks and 13% reported strokes. Diabetes and Parkinson's disease were also uncommon in the group, striking only 3% of the subjects each. Like centenarians, supercentenarians seem to be good at putting off the day when they become disabled, says Perls.
yahoo.co.in There is no simple answer to the question of which cellular proteins or signalling pathways are responsible for making a cell cancerous. (...) Mutations in the gene for the retinoblastoma tumour-suppressor protein, which is part of another signalling pathway, are also frequently associated with cancer. When put together, the findings of Firestein et al. and Morris et al., presented in this issue, lead to the identification of a point at which these important pathways could communicate with each other in colorectal cancer.
The late metastasis model places selection of genetic and epigenetic alterations mostly inside the primary tumor. If so, late-disseminating cells are genetically similar to the primary tumor, which can be used as a surrogate marker to choose a drug against disseminated tumor cells. (Bottom) By contrast, early-disseminated tumor cells accumulate such alterations at distant sites and diverge genetically from the primary tumors. Consequently, they may respond differently to drugs that are administered systemically.
Learning to associate an environmental signal with a reward is critical for survival. Addictive drugs short-circuit this system. They similarly increase synaptic strength, but do so for very long periods.
What these special instances of nonlinear energy transfer do promise, however, are some long-sought experimental entries into the microscopic origins of friction. The slowing down of mechanical motion by friction is nothing but the effectively irreversible transfer of molecular kinetic energy into a sea of countless other molecular degrees of freedom. The second law of thermodynamics guarantees that such transfers occur, but it cannot explain how or when they happen, or reveal the specific molecular motions involved.
Thirty percent of those questioned said President George W. Bush's campaign has made the terrorist network stronger, while 29 percent said it had no effect. Only 22 percent said al-Qaeda has been weakened.
The survey of 23,937 people was conducted for the BBC's World Service in 23 nations between July 8 and Sept. 12 by GlobeScan Inc. and the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes.
minet.uni-jena.de, L. Winter - lwinter
soziologie.rwth-aachen.de, Aug. 2008, Advances in Complex Systems, DOI: 10.1142/S0219525908001878
Can Ants Solve Traffic Jams?, Danielle Parsons, Slatev.com, 08/07/22As roads and highways become ever more clogged, Danielle Parsons tells us how researchers are studying ways to learn from nature's own traffic-flow experts: ants.
"Approaching Complexity" Workshop, IT Revolutions, Venice, 08/12/17-19
2009 Intl Conf of the System Dynamics Society,
Albuquerque, New Mexico, 09/07/26-30
Dear ComDig Readers,
Our editor, Dr. Gottfried Mayer, is affectionately esteemed by many of you -- as readers, you know he devotes himself unselfishly to widening our knowledge of complexity science. He was recently diagnosed with advanced colon cancer and given a timetable of a very few years. Knowing Gottfried, you can imagine that, in addition to the customary processes of chemotherapy, he would explore other frontier therapies, especially those arising out of interdisciplinary applications of complexity. These are expensive ... if he can find them.
Many of you have sent your good wishes and indicated your desire to assist. With Gottfried's permission, I am posting this note with information, below, about how to send contributions to him. Please indicate the source since Gottfried will want to express his warm gratitude.
I know that Gottfried, the good scientist that he is, will explain from time to time what he is doing and what the results are ... and we will follow his progress with great interest and hope.
Dean LeBaron
Publisher, Complexity Digest
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