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nikolas smyrlakis

SiG | Social Innovation Generation - 0 views

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    How about that for an abstract discipline, and I thought CMS was abstract. Sounds great though: Social Innovation Generation: "Social innovation is an initiative, product, process or program that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. Successful social innovations have durability and broad impact. While social innovation has recognizable stages and phases, achieving durability and scale is a dynamic process that requires both emergence of opportunity and deliberate agency, and a connection between the two."
LeopoldS

CREAX - Function Database - 0 views

shared by LeopoldS on 24 Jun 09 - Cached
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    Functional classification of knowledge is a very effective way of stripping away boundaries between different industries and scientific disciplines. The function database provides descriptions, examples and animations for all known effects that can produce a function.
johannessimon81

Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past - 6 views

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    Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?
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    Good luck to them!!
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    "Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past". GREAT! And physicists probably predict the past with data from the future?!? "scientists and mathematicians analyze history in the hopes of finding patterns they can then use to predict the future". Big deal! That's what any scientist does anyway... "cliodynamics"!? Give me a break!
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    still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and
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    It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.
Luís F. Simões

The Emerging Revolution in Game Theory - Technology Review - 2 views

  • The world of game theory is currently on fire. In May, Freeman Dyson at Princeton University and William Press at the University of Texas announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner's dilemma which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other. That's a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner's Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more.
  • Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1208.2666: Winning isn't everything: Evolutionary stability of Zero Determinant strategies
Luís F. Simões

Barabasi, A.-L. (2012). The network takeover. Nat Phys, 8(1), 14-16. - 1 views

  • Reductionism, as a paradigm, is expired, and complexity, as a field, is tired. Data-based mathematical models of complex systems are offering a fresh perspective, rapidly developing into a new discipline: network science.
Thijs Versloot

Active Metasurfaces for Advanced Wavefront Engineering #Harvard - 4 views

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    Metasurfaces have been made, but the problem is that they usually are static and for quantum optic applications the question is how to make a rapidly configurable metasurface. for this Harvard has initiated a multidisciplinary team that involves theoretical physics, metamaterials, nanophotonic circuitry, quantum devices, plasmonics, nanofabrication, and computational modeling
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    Reading "wavefront engineering" in the title I thought it had to do with wave manipulation in the sea. Nothing to do though. As I read further in this article, Harvard thrives in forming multidisciplinarity groups. Their practice is to call the best team in each expertise they need to merge. Not one researcher from each discipline, but teams of experienced professors and a series of graduate students. Maybe we could discuss it in the retreat!
ESA ACT

Computational Social Science -- Lazer et al. 323 (5915): 721 -- Science - 0 views

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    What a field! Perfect for the ACT!!!
Luís F. Simões

Nature's special issue on Interdisciplinarity - 2 views

  • Nature’s special issue probes how scientists and social scientists are coming together to solve the grand challenges of energy, food, water, climate and health. This special scrutinizes the data on interdisciplinary work and looks at its history, meaning and funding. A case study and a reappraisal of the Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton explore the rewards of breaking down boundaries. Meanwhile, a sustainability institute shares its principles for researchers who work across disciplines. Thus inspired, we invite readers to test their polymathy in our lighthearted quiz.
Luís F. Simões

Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future? - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • The Peculiar Blindness of Experts Credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the future. But reliable forecasting is possible.
  • The result: The experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire. As the Danish proverb warns, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
  • Tetlock and Mellers found that not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, but they tended to have qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators. They were “curious about, well, really everything,” as one of the top forecasters told me. They crossed disciplines, and viewed their teammates as sources for learning, rather than peers to be convinced. When those foxes were later grouped into much smaller teams—12 members each—they became even more accurate. They outperformed—by a lot—a group of experienced intelligence analysts with access to classified data.
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  • This article is adapted from David Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
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