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A communication-centered explanation of the difficulty to reform Wall Street so far would depend largely on which view of public opinion and the nature of the public sphere (indeed, which view of democracy) you adopt. University of Pennsylvania Provost and communication researcher Vincent Price (2008) usefully describes four models of the public sphere that could potentially apply to the U.S. at various points in the debate over financial reform and other issues:
"But in this context, the vacuum is not an “unrealistic assumption” but an abstraction that eliminates a known condition, air resistance. It is not a feature grafted on to make a construct tidy, but the stripping away of an environmental element to see if getting rid of it exposes an underlying, durable pattern. This procedure is in keeping with how mathematics as a discipline evolved, through the successive whittling away of extraneous elements.
But in economics, core and oft-used assumptions necessary to make many theories work, such as “everyone has perfect information,” are unrealistic not in the sense of stripping out real-world aspects that are noisy, but in adding properties that are not observed or even well-approximated in reality. Yet they are deemed valid and those who protest are referred to Friedman. "
Sunday is the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a commemoration of the day, I'm going to investigate answers to a very simple question: what is the probability of a 9/11-size or larger terrorist attack?
"We consider a network of coupled agents playing the Prisoner's Dilemma game, in which players are allowed to pick a strategy in the interval [0,1], with 0 corresponding to defection, 1 to cooperation, and intermediate values representing mixed strategies in which each player may act as a cooperator or a defector over a large number of interactions with a certain probability. Our model is payoff-driven, i.e., we assume that the level of accumulated payoff at each node is a relevant parameter in the selection of strategies. Also, we consider that each player chooses his/her strategy in a context of limited information. We present a deterministic nonlinear model for the evolution of strategies. We show that the final strategies depend on the network structure and on the choice of the parameters of the game. We find that polarized strategies (pure cooperator/defector states) typically emerge when (i) the network connections are sparse, (ii) the network degree distribution is heterogeneous, (iii) the network is assortative, and surprisingly, (iv) the benefit of cooperation is high. "
"So how can we have both networks and spheres? How do we avoid the pitfalls of a globalization that has no real globe in which to place everything? In a work presented at the Venice Biennale in 2009, Tomas Saraceno provided a great, and no doubt unintended, metaphor for social theory. In an entire room inside the Biennale’s main pavilion, Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2008) consisted of carefully mounted elastic connectors that produced the shape of networks and spheres."
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There is no better way to frame this question than the bungled dialog (well, not really a “dialogue,” but that’s the point) between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein in Paris in 1922. Bergson had carefully studied Einstein’s theory of relativity and wrote a thick book about it, but Einstein had only a few dismissive comments about Bergson’s argument.4 After Bergson spoke for thirty minutes, Einstein made a terse two-minute remark, ending with this damning sentence: “Hence there is no philosopher’s time; there is only a psychological time different from the time of the physicist.” While Bergson had argued that his notion of space and time had a cosmological import that was to be carefully meshed within Einstein’s remarkable discoveries, Einstein argued that there was only one time and space—that of physics—and that what Bergson was after was nothing more than subjective time—that of psychology. We recognize here the classical way for scientists to deal with philosophy, politics, and art: “What you say might be nice and interesting but it has no cosmological relevance because it only deals with the subjective elements, the lived world, not the real world.”
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It may seem silly to ask an artist to adjudicate a debate between a philosopher and a physicist—especially a debate whose pecking order had been historically settled once and for all: the physicist speaks of the real world, and the philosopher “does not understand physics”; the artist is irrelevant here. But that was precisely the point, a point shared by Saraceno’s heterarchy: that it is now possible to complicate the hierarchy of voices and make the conversation between disciplines move ahead in a way that is more representative of the twenty-first century than of the twentieth. No discipline is the final arbiter of any other.
"So what does this predict? Like Blinder’s aphorism, it suggests that we will observe a broad empirical correlation between (a) the extent of disagreement among economists, and (b) the involvement of economists in political disputes. ‘Eat your greens’ propositions that are popular among economists, but more or less equally uncongenial to all political actors in a given system will, as in Blinder’s formulation, be systematically ignored. But economists’ influence will not be particularly high when they disagree with each other, since different economists arguing for different sides of the political debate will at least partially cancel each other out. It will be far higher on those rare and fleeting occasions when economists unite in favor of the one or the other side actively participating in a political debate."
News post on an optimistic report on changing world energy supplies. We just need to divert 3% of world GDP to efficiency, renewables, and infrastructure. Whew!
" Typically, linear per capita indicators are used to characterize and rank cities. However, these implicitly ignore the fundamental role of nonlinear agglomeration integral to the life history of cities. As such, per capita indicators conflate general nonlinear effects, common to all cities, with local dynamics, specific to each city, failing to provide direct measures of the impact of local events and policy. Agglomeration nonlinearities are explicitly manifested by the superlinear power law scaling of most urban socioeconomic indicators with population size, all with similar exponents (1.15). As a result larger cities are disproportionally the centers of innovation, wealth and crime, all to approximately the same degree. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. "
"In an article this month in PLoS ONE, Bettencourt and his team created a way to measure how exceptional cities are by comparing their characteristics with what mathematics would predict for their size. The team then ranked the exceptionality of 300 U.S. cities based on personal incomes, gross metropolitan product (GMP), number of patents and number of violent crimes. "
Welcome to the Tripoli Minnesota Website. We are prefecture #45 of the Tripoli Rocketry Association
in list: Twin Cities Stuff
But all the tools in the world are useless if we lack the imagination needed to build the right models. Models are built to answer specific questions.
in list: Economic Crisis
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We need to take a close look at how the sociology of our profession led to an outcome where people were made to feel embarrassed for even asking certain types of questions. People will always be passionate in defense of their life's work, so it's not the rhetoric itself that is of concern, the problem comes when factors such as ideology or control of journals and other outlets for the dissemination of research stand in the way of promising alternative lines of inquiry.
I don't know for sure the extent to which the ability of a small number of people in the field to control the academic discourse led to a concentration of power that stood in the way of alternative lines of investigation, or the extent to which the ideology that markets prices always tend to move toward their long-run equilibrium values caused us to ignore voices that foresaw the developing bubble and coming crisis. But something caused most of us to ask the wrong questions, and to dismiss the people who got it right, and I think one of our first orders of business is to understand how and why that happened.
This all seems to add up to a consistent expert consensus that humans quite often, perhaps even usually, just don’t know why they do what they do. And this is extremely disturbing, as it calls into question our own opinions about why we do what we do.
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Thus the practice of academic economics implicitly accepts that people often, perhaps even usually, do things for reasons other than the reasons they give.
Consider also that something similar holds in sales and marketing. The rationale a marketer gives for why an ad or other product strategy works usually differs quite a bit from the reasons people give for why they like an ad or a product. Similarly, the reasons dating and other relation consultants give for why their suggested strategies help people like or respect you are often quite at odds with the reasons people give for why they like or respect others.
Agent-based computational models can capture irrational behaviour, complex social networks and global scale — all essential in confronting H1N1, says Joshua M. Epstein.
Tipping point stories are fascinating, but do we observe them in the real world? I became intrigued with this question a while ago and eventually published a paper testing the predictions of the tipping point story for its original application – racial segregation of US neighbourhoods
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The basic prediction is that mixed neighbourhood are unstable but segregated neighbourhood are stable. Data on American neighbourhoods from 1970 to 2000 rejected these predictions – it was the segregated neighbourhood that were unstable. There was as much “white flight” out of all-white neighbourhoods as there was out of mixed neighbourhoods, and there was a white influx into segregated non-white neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods are still very segregated in the year 2000, but not because of tipping. Maybe segregation exists because most whites really do want segregation, not because of a chain reaction due to herd behaviour.
In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced the apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: "Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence". Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organization where the way of promotion rewards the best members and where the competence at their new level in the hierarchical structure does not depend on the competence they had at the previous level, usually because the tasks of the levels are very different between each other. Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only the "Peter principle" is unavoidable, but it yields in turn a significant reduction of the global efficiency of the organization. Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counter intuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence.
Picoeconomics (micro-micro-economics) explores the implications of an experimental discovery: that people (often) and lower animals (always) discount the prospect of future rewards in a curve that is more deeply bowed than a "rational," exponential curve. Over a range of delays from seconds to decades, there are pairs of alternative rewards such that subjects prefer the smaller, earlier reward over the larger, later alternative when delay to the smaller reward will be short, but prefer the larger, later reward when the smaller alternative will be more delayed, even though the time from the earlier to the later reward stays the same. The curves that fit the observed data best are hyperbolic, that is, show value as inversely proportional to delay.
What, then, is leadership in the cloud? It is not like leadership in the tower. It is not a position wrought from power, but authority in its other, and more primary meaning, ‘to be the master of’. Authority in the cloud is drawn from dedication, or, to use rather more precise language, love. Love is what holds the cloud together. People are attracted to the cloud because they are in love with the aim of the cloud.
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