CSSS 2007 Santa Fe-Readings

CSSS Santa Fe 2007 Home Faculty U.S. Visa Requirements Participants Schedule Readings Logistics Travel Projects & Working Groups Tutorials After Hours Photos T-shirt Design Forum Project Presentations Final Papers

Week One

Modeling: Stephen Guerin, Owen Densmore, Josh Thorp
Stephen@Redfish.com, Owen@Redfish.com, Josh@Redfish.com
First of all, download the NetLogo 4.0 application: NetLogo Home
Then read the documents: NetLogo Docs which are also in the application under the Help menu.
Homework: Run NetLogo and look at the documentation .. especially the Learning and Reference sections. Then run and look at the code for at least three of the Model Library examples which are under the File Menu -> Model Library.

Week Two

Jennifer Dunne & Neo Martinez
Food Webs

Network structure and biodiversity loss in food webs: robustness increases with connectance
Food-web structure and network theory: The role of connectance and size
Simple rules yield complex food webs
Allometric scaling enhances stability in complex food webs
Stabilization of chaotic and non-permanent food web dynamics
The Network Structure of Food Webs

Week Three

Blake LeBaron
Finance
Agent-based Computational Finance
A Builder's Guide to Agent Based Financial Markets
Long-Memory in an Order-Driven Market

Week Four

Van Savage
Allometry

I recommend that all students look through the first couple of chapters of Reading 2. Otherwise, the students
should choose to read from among these based on what their interests and backgrounds are.

GENERAL LITERATURE ON BIOLOGICAL SCALING:

0. In the Beat of a Heart by John Whitfield (A recent popular science book about the history of and work on scaling relationships in biology.)

1. Chapters 2 and 3 of On Growth and Form by D'arcy Thompson (This is a seminal text for all mathematical biology.)

2. Scaling: Why is Animal Size so Important by Knut Schmidt-Nielsen (This is an extremely clear and fairly succinct explanation of scaling in biology up to the 1980's. This book focuses on physiology.)

3. The Ecological Implications of Body Size by R.H. Peters (This book discusses how scaling relationships are useful in ecology, and it has an incredibly useful set of appendices for scaling relationships.)

4. Size, Function, and Life History by W.A. Calder (Another good book on scaling and ecology.)

5. Scaling in Biology (SFI book), edited by J.H. Brown and G.B. West (This book is a collection of articles by the leaders in the field, and updates the literature in the scaling field, including numerous theoretical advances of great importance.)

PAPERS FOR ORIGINS OF SCALING LAWS:

6. "A General Model for the Origin of Allometric Scaling Laws in Biology", G.B. West, J.H. Brown, and B.J. Enquist 1997, Science (276) 122-126.
(This paper is a classic and puts forward the leading theory for an explanation of scaling relationships in biology.
The authors use a few simple assumptions about the structure and function of the cardiovascular system to construct the most powerfully predictive theory to date.)

7. V. M. Savage and G. B. West (2006). Biological scaling and physiological time:

Biomedical applications. in Complex System Science in Biomedicine. Ed. T. S. Deisboeck
and J. Y. Kresh, New York, Kluwer Academic.

(The first part of this book chapter gives a more detailed account of the assumptions and derivations listed in Reading 6, and it also explains how biological rates and times depend on body temperature. This book contains several chapters by SFI faculty and alums and should provide interesting reading to those interested in the health sciences or an introduction to complex systems.)

PAPERS ON APPLYING SCALING RELATIONSHIPS TO ECOLOGY:

10. "Size and Scaling of Predator-Prey Dynamics" J Weitz and SA Levin Ecol. Lett. 2006, (9) 548-557.
(This paper represents one of the first attempts to combine scaling relationships for body body mass with species interactions.)