CSSS 2010 Santa Fe-Blog

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Use this page as an informal forum to share your opinion and discuss anything at CSSS'10.

• Michael Szell: Some people asked me about the URL of my online game. Here it is: http://www.pardus.at - Enjoy! :) (The tutorial may some time to complete..)

• June 7 (Ana Hocevar): So I know my official day of contribution on the blog is not until tomorrow, but I wanted to share this with those who are interested. When I get inspired by someone giving a good talk, I have a tendency to write down some of the statements I find encouraging or funny and so on. So here are my favorite quotes from the first day of lectures (and I hope the lecturers don't mind this):

"If there is one thing you should learn at the summer school, it's to speak up." -Dan Rockmore

"Science is a social thing." - Dan Rockmore

"You start with a beautiful idea and end up with reality." - Dan Rockmore

"Commit to taking advantage of this opportunity." -Dan Rockmore

"Let it all marinate up there." -Dan Rockmore

"And wear sunscreen." -Ginger Richardson

Dan Rockmore: Here is a link to the NYR piece I mentioned today http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/24/other-side-science/ Good to meet you all and looking fwd to a great CSSS.

Monday June 7

Maria Opazo

Alison Snyder

I thought it might be interesting to give my perspective on today as a journalist and writer. What I starred and underlined in my notebook, what stuck in my head and why.

First as a journalist…

Schooling Fish

I’m familiar with some of Iain’s research – the beautiful images and descriptions of phenomena that many curious people outside the sciences have seen and thought about lends itself to visual storytelling -- but today was the first time I heard him discuss his fish work. In particular, I’m going to follow what he’s looking at in terms of how individuals influence others in the group and the (preliminary?) finding that some individuals consistently influence the group. Because it is unpublished, I’ll check in with him periodically to discuss in more detail and see how the research is progressing as well as whether and when he might expect to publish the research.

Moiré-ing

Have you ever seen someone on TV who's striped shirt competed with the gravity of what they were saying? In TV production we pay editors large amounts of money for hours of work to fix moiré-ing so the term “numerical moiré-ing” caught my attention.

Chaotic Mixing

Liz mentioned her CU colleague who described clams that open up to exploit chaotic mixing to mix up their gametes. The counterintuitive idea of systems not only embracing chaos but exploiting it, is a provocative theme to explore in a general audience story. To most people, chaos is something to be avoided.

Ideas that got my attention as a writer…

Gas Gauges and Indelible Images

In opening her lecture, Liz used the metaphor of her old car’s gas gauge to illustrate non-linearity. The gauge stayed on full then plunged when the tank was near empty rather than dropping as the gas level dropped. While it was a brief aside about a concept that is very easily understandable to a scientist, it might not be to a non-scientist. To someone who has never heard of or thought about non-linearity, they will understand it the first time they hear this metaphor and they’ll remember it. Even if they forget what the gas needle was illustrating, they can back track. Non-linearity becomes an indelible idea.

As a writer, the metaphor also reminded me of the power of a simple idea in telling a story. One of the most difficult tasks is parsing the scale of what a story is about. Sometimes the most meaningful way to tell a story about the Empire State building is to describe one of the bricks.

In other words, today was full of lots of ideas about research to follow and reminders about how to effectively communicate even the most basic of ideas and the power of doing just that.

Looking forward to tomorrow…

Kyla Dahlin

My notes from today are mostly graphs, equations, and Dan's quoted quote about "what if biologists had tried to develop a theory of gravity." I'd love to see a debate between the math/physics/universality camp and the biology/ecology/sociology/everything is different camp. Seems like an interesting tension within Complex Systems folks.

So far the self-organization into project groups seems to be going well, and I'm sure it will evolve over time. Tonight a few of us talked about the pressure to collaborate being somewhat foreign - so much of PhD work is so solitary. I'm sure the sociologists would love to track the networks that are forming, the different players, and our final results.

And I think we all are trying to maintain a balance of fun, thinking, working, and staying level in a world with constantly flowing coffee.

Lucas Antiqueira

Some first impressions:

This first day of lectures was really nice. I was exposed to subjects I'm not quite familiar with, lectures were excellent and inspiring, projects started to evolve. The process of getting to know people continued, there are so many brilliant minds here.

The summer school is a dream coming true for me. I've been in Santa Fe for only a few days, and I can definitely tell that these days are among the most gratifying in my academic life. And things have just begun!

Many thanks for the SFI/St.John's staff for the support! Not to mention the food, which is excellent by the way!

Tuesday June 8

Andrew Banooni

Some of you have heard me use this analogy, and I’m certain that many others of you have heard it elsewhere, but they say that the amount of material there is to learn in medical school is a bit like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. One thing that I had not realized until attending yesterday and today’s lectures, however, is how homogeneous that information seems, now that I’ve gotten a taste of the multidisciplinary approach here at SFI. Sure, there are a tremendous number of disease processes that involve vastly different physiologic systems, and don’t even get me started on all the bugs and drugs we have to learn, but it’s all medical. We don’t sit and discuss econometrics (actually I don’t think I’ve ever had a discussion about econometrics), or the influence of individual fish on collective behavior. Over the past two days, I’ve dusted off cobwebs from parts of my brain that I feel I haven’t used in years. I don’t mean to say that I am rusty in certain topics (and completely new to many others), but rather that I feel that in the past 48 hours I have been thinking in ways I haven’t had to think in my graduate training. In medicine, you can survive by learning a tremendous number of facts and then regurgitating them at the appropriate time. We observe, we recognize patterns, we diagnose, we treat. I am so thankful for this refreshing reminder that there is so much more enrichment to be had, that the medical problem I am trying to solve can share many similarities with a physical, financial, or aeronautic one my colleague might be struggling with. I feel inspired by every one of you, very lucky to be here, and I look forward to three amazing weeks!

Andreas Ligtvoet

Liz

• It's a skill to explain difficult stuff in an easy way.
• Lots of dusting off of things I should know, but forgot.

Peter

• Some interesting discussion about the end of theory due to access to large amount of data. It doesn't help you understand stuff, though.
• Walmart seems to have enormous amounts of data. A colleague of mine suggested finding ecologies of consumer products. What type of furniture goes best with red napkins?
• We can create huge amounts of non-existant networks and have fun with them.
• An average node degree of about 4 leads to hairballs. What can we do with those?

Iain

• The larger the group of naive individuals, the (relatively) easier it is to influence it. For 10 individuals you need 50% 'leaders', whereas for larger groups only a few %.
• Another interesting remark either yesterday or today: just because you have a nice model for some fish species, doesn't mean you can apply it to cows or bugs or. ..
• THe details of the system do not matter in a collective transition.
• As soon as you behave differently, you are nailed.

Tom

• How much to put in a model? Not too much, says Tom. However, what good is an "economic" model that shows a Bolzman distribution? His answer is that this is a natural law in other words, you will never make an economy where the Bolzman distribution does not exist. It is even worse if you allow people to invest.
  • In the state of Ilinois, Pi was legally defined as 3.
  • Stochastics from στοχαστικός, from στοχάζομαι ‘aim at a target, guess’, from στόχος ‘an aim, a guess’.
  • Mention power law and get published!
• Immunize Pig/Mexican/Flu: make use of power law in a network => your friends are more connected than you are! Fascinating...
• We don't know all that much about networks: we don't know what matters.
• Agents with genomes: 10010101. DIstribution split of genome crossover matter!
  • T-shirt sniffing leads to selection of different immune systems.
• In complex systems there is a lot of exploratory stuff.
• Tom is a (scientific) heretic.

Drinks

@Cowgirls. What's this ID thing about anyway? Don't I look old enough?

Xin Wang

The topics today are involved in nonlinear dynamics, complex networks and collective behaviors. I am very interested in those topics before this summer school, and through lectures I get the deeper understanding about those three areas.

But what impresses me most is that the students here are very active and it is different from the situation in China. In the meantime, I enjoy the joy of communicating with people from different backgrounds and getting cross-field collaboration.

Ana Hocevar

I am not a blog person really, I've never written a blog before, but I guess CSSS is also a great opportunity for trying out new things unrelated to science. So, here I go.

As many others, I can't get over how amazing Iain Couzin's talks were. I am very impressed and greatly inspired. Usually attending physics conferences that left me wondering what it was that I was missing, Iain I think made me realize I prefer systems that include things with eyes and wings. Or perhaps gills? Amazing work in my opinion, really.

I should also thank Liz Bradley for giving incredibly clear lectures on nonlinear dynamics. From the courses I had on chaos, I wouldn't imagine such an intuitive presentation of the topic is possible. It certainly isn't easy, so: Liz, you rock!

I haven't been enjoying only the lectures, though. Dancing to no music with Andrew, listening to Jonathan playing the violin, stimulating discussions over lunch or breakfast, great food (we even have ice-cream!) and so much more...

So with such great company, such cool science and so many wonderful things still ahead of us, I can only say I am very grateful to be here.

Other remarks

Some people may be interested in the http://decoi.collectivae.net/ Design Of Collective Intelligence series - those are 1 week long versions of what SFI is trying to do, but mainly focused at multi agent systems.

Also interesting, and this is even a longer shot, is http://www.nextgenerationinfrastructures.eu/academy if you are interested in (physical) networks and infrastructures.

Here is an article about the spread of contagion in a social network written for a general audience, as an example of science journalism:

"Infectious Personalities", The Economist, May 13, 2010. http://www.economist.com/node/16103882

AS

Wednesday June 9

Today was a sad day for Dutch politics. Ligtvoet

Thank you Paige and Coco. Samuel_Scarpino

Ingrid van Putten

Thomas Maillart

This morning Peter told about network attack tolerance. The results obtained by Albert et al. Nature (2000) for scale-free networks are a direct consequence of the "robust yet fragile" (also called HOT - Highly Optimized Tolerance) concept first coined by Carlson et al. Physical Review Letters also in 2000. However, Newman et al. criticized the HOT model (in Physical Review Letters, 2002), arguing that while "optimized", scale-free systems, the optimization process should occur at some costs. Thus, they introduced the COLD model ("constrained optimization with limited deviations"), by adding a cost to optimization (i.e. preventing the formation of scale-free systems). Under these conditions, the tolerance to attacks should be improved. The interesting point behind the message, is that there is an intrinsic trade-off between optimization and risks, i.e. optimized systems are prone to suffer more extreme damage (heavy-tailed distribution of damage).

On the same topic, Doyle et al. (PNAS 2005) argued that the model by Albert et al. (Nature 2000) does not hold for the Internet because the most connected nodes are not in the core of the Internet, which is typically low connected. The main point of this article is to point the importance of looking at the mesoscopic structure of real networks, and not only their degree distribution or general purpose metrics.

Vessela Daskalova
Kasia Samson

Thursday June 10

Anna Pechenkina
Chaitayna Gokhale
Jing Li
Griff Rees

Bradford Cross has a great post on learning about network theory that everyone with an interest in networks will probably find useful. Look at it or bookmark it for later, it compliments our previous lectures well.

Friday June 11

Kang Zhao
Florian Sabou
Roberta Sinatra
Bogdan State

Monday June 14

Andrew Hein
Tracey McDole
Sergey Melnik
Erik Van den Broecke

Tuesday June 15

Drew Levin
Leif Karlstrom
Mark Laidre
Borys Wrobel

Wednesday June 16

Joseph Gran
Micael Ehn
Damian Blasi
Daniel Jones

Thursday June 17

Yixian Song
Sam Scarpino
Giovanni Petri
Michael Szell

Friday June 18

Sandra Bennun
Susanne Shultz
Lynette Shaw
Sarah Wise

Monday June 21

Dan MacKinlay
Megan Olsen
Vanessa Weinberger
Jonathan Cannon

Tuesday June 22

Erika Legara
Gavin Fay
Bruno Abrahao
Zhiyuan Song

Wednesday June 23

Julie Granka
Nick Foti
Felix Hol
Oana Carja