CSSS 2010 Santa Fe-Projects & Working Groups
From Santa Fe Institute Events Wiki
| CSSS Santa Fe 2010 |
Students are required to craft a research project -- use this page to brainstorm and organize your efforts.
Evolution of Words (Dan Rockmore) - In a class on complex systems that I teach at Dartmouth one of the final projects seemed to indicate from a small and somewhat biased sample of English words, that word origins (as indicated by one of the online dictionaries) seem clustered at certain times. As a start I would propose a mining of this info in some online dictionary, performing some initial analysis and see if "there is a there, there.." and if so, keep on going.
Dynamics of Equities Market Structure (Dan Rockmore) - In a paper of mine w/some of my buddies (some of whom you will meet this summer), "Topological Structures in the Equities Market," PNAS December 30, 2008 vol. 105 no. 52 20589-20594, we found some interesting structure in the correlation network of the NYSE equities market. This required a choice of a time window. It would be interesting to see how/if this structure changes over time and window size, especially on either side of market crises. Scott Pauls has code that could be used to do some of this analysis.
Movement Careers of Couchsurfing.org members (Bogdan State) - I am working with Couchsurfing.org and two Stanford Professors in trying to analyze this social movement organization's member data. One aspect both we and the Couchsurfing management are interested in is the evolution of members in the movement over time. I would like to perform a preliminary analysis of these "movement careers", using a sample of about 10,000 nodes (out of 1.7 milion) we are scheduled to obtain soon.
"Genes for Breakfast" (Yixian Song) - I've read a paper of Redfield(1993) "Genes for Breakfast: The Have-Your-Cake and-Eat-lt-Too of Bacterial Transformation". Though it's an old publication, I still find the idea very inspiring. Well considering bacteria living in a gene-pool with abandoned DNA strands, each bacterium can randomly "eat" free DNA strands, and use them as nutrition or for DNA repairing or even gene improvement. But the DNA strands were abandoned for a reason. Some of them can be virulent.(!!!) Besides bacteria can exchange DNA with each other, of course. We can define a population size of bacteria, amount of free DNA strands in gene-pool, percentage of virulent DNA and their virulence (impact on the bacteria fitness). We certainly can also consider the bacteria as a metapopulation.("A metapopulation consists of a group of spatially separated populations of the same species which interact at some level." - says wikipedia.org) The question to be answered will be "in which situation the bacterial population will become extinct in the end".