CSSS 2006 Beijing-Readings

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Below are some readings that can provide some background for some of the lectures and/or that you can read after the lecturers to pursue some ideas further. These readings are not required. I will be updating this list fairly frequently. --Dpf 19:15, 26 June 2006 (MDT)

General Background

Cosma Shalizi, Methods and Techniques of Complex Systems Science: An Overview. Chapter 1 (pp. 33--114) in Thomas S. Deisboeck and J. Yasha Kresh (eds.), Complex Systems Science in Biomedicine (New York: Springer, 2006.) This is an excellent, thorough review of the "field" -- to the extent that there is such a thing -- of complex systems. Covers many tools: statistical learning and model selection; time series analysis; cellular automata; agent-based models; the evaluation of complex-systems models; information theory; and ways of measuring complexity. Contains over 250 references. Also available here.

James Crutchfield, What Lies between Order and Chaos?, in Art and Complexity, J. Casti, editor, Oxford University Press (2002). An interesting, non-technical essay discussing how new patterns are discovered, and how complexity arises from the interplay between order and chaos. This is an excellent introduction to the notions of complexity and emergence, and history of one strand of the study of complex systems.

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Readings Associated with Particular Lecturers

Cosma Shalizi

M. E. J. Newman, Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law, Contemporary Physics 46, 323-351 (2005). An excellent paper. Good background for Cosma's lecture on power laws.

Herb Gintis

Herbert Gintis, A Framework for the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, forthcoming 2006. Parts of Herb's lectures will be based on this paper.