Robustness and resilience of Complex Networks: the new essay in the last #ComplexityThoughts featuring also Shlomo Havlin, Alex Arenas, @PessoaBrain , Giulia Menichetti, Marta Gonzàlez to discuss applications from cells to social & urban systems.
A network that shaped our present: ~400,000 km of roads connecting thousands of cities & villages.
An emblematic physical manifestation of complex adaptive systems, allowing for goods, people and cultures to flow through continents and flourish along millennia.
During the assessments today, some students were able to use five systems-thinking-terms in one sentence, after which I needed extra time to understand what they were trying to explain. 🤔
So now I am going to self-organise my dessert into emergence with a macro-diversity of fruit, and hurry my path-dependent self into contingent.
SYSTEMS + VULNERABILITIES. This is one of the few cyber-security books that seems to grasp the realities of complex systems dynamics. That these ideas are not yet mainstream in the security industry, let alone Organizationland, while everything in our lives becomes increasingly systematized, should concern you. Highly recommended.
I have listened to the first 2 episodes of Tipping Point: The True Story of "The Limits to Growth". Love it, even though it is quite confronting.
The story shows the complexity of showing complexity, gives insight into how the researchers dealt with narrow minded responses on holistic views. An interesting struggle, described from the viewpoint of Donella (Dana) Meadows. With old materials from the 70s.
These days I restarted to do some experiments with LLMs.
I find it very interesting and useful to let the #LLM draw complex analogies in domains I lack intuition, either because they are very abstract or just new to me.
Here is a cool example to explore gene regulation:
Defining the codomain I want to use.
Draw analogies and create a story.
Reading this from Ecological Complexity: “The adaptive cycle: More than a metaphor” and wondering if you have favorite non-metaphorical perspectives on measuring adaptive capacity in organizations and networks?
Quiz: can you guess what it is (in terms of a general dynamical process or even using a specific example) just by watching how the system changes over time?
A new #ComplexityThougths short essay is out: this time I write about the ongoing debate around the Nature paper on assembly theory. The essay features comments by Sara Imari Walker, Ricard Solè and Hector Zenil, and it's an attempt to provide a balanced overview of what's going on.
Do you know of any examples of this type of approach? Especially ones that led to a new type of therapy that is either approved, in clinical trials or just thought of? Maybe cancer?
Albeit then also going forward to therapeutic interventions?
Quite rare, difficult to qualify & interpret!
Just learned:
''Sham stimulation'
as placebo effect equivalent —inactive, brief, or weak form of directed brainwaves— for: #tDCS Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation #tACS Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation #tRNS Transcranial Random Noise Stimulation
Isn’t that kind of linear thinking messing up our world?🌍 Stories of earlier interference with nature and the unintended consequences should be a warning! ⚠️
Anyone listening? 🤷♀️
And the unintended consequences of this action probably cannot be solved with dropping a bunch of cats on parachutes from the sky 🐈 🪂
If you are curious about the novel results published in Science and Nature by the collaboration btw Meta and US academics, you might want to read #ComplexityThoughts
I try to build some background for non-experts of #ComputationalSocialScience and summarize the main findings.
Finally, I dig into the ongoing debate, covering existing documents and my chats with Sandra González-Bailón, Sander van der Linden, Pierluigi Sacco and others
This debate might be of high interest for self-organized decentralized platforms, such as #Mastodon and the #Fediverse in general