plektix - The Emergent Fool

Posted by plektix in Culture, Evolution, Genetics on 03 2nd, 2010 | 4 Comments

A while ago, I wrote on the hypothesis that humans have essentially stopped evolving genetically, because of our cultural emphasis on keeping all humans alive, no matter how disadvantaged. The New York Times reports today on the opposite idea: that human culture may actually intensify the selective...

The Idea of Applied Mathematics...

Posted by plektix in Mathematics, Models on 02 25th, 2010 | No Comments

Mathematicians occupy an odd place in the public imagination, as objects of great curiosity and also great misunderstanding. TV and movies portray us as anything from eccentric to insane, though sometimes we get to solve crimes. But there is rather little public understanding of what mathematicians...

Posted by plektix in Cooperation, Evolution, Games, Society on 01 5th, 2010 | 3 Comments

As a mathematical evolutionary theorist, I use abstract methods to investigate how the structure of an evolutionary process determines whether social behaviors like cooperation can be successful. So I was excited to learn over the holidays (from David Carballo, archaeologist and family friend of my partner)...

Highlights from the Year in Ideas...

Posted by plektix in Alternative Institutions, Artificial Intelligence, Crowdsourcing, Games, Mathematics, Philanthropy on 12 13th, 2009 | 1 Comment

The New York Times Year in Review section always has some good ones. Some highlights for me from this year: Does feeling like a fraud make you act like one? Researchers gave experiment subjects designer-style sunglasses from boxes marked “authentic” or “counterfeit”. They then put...

Book Review: LOGICOMIX...

Posted by plektix in Language, Mathematics, Media on 11 23rd, 2009 | 5 Comments

We are living in an age of, amongst other things, excellent graphic novels. One shining example, which I have just finished reading, is LOGICOMIX, a graphic novel biography of mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. (Side note: can a biography still be called a graphic novel? Our terminology may need...

Unsustainable...

Posted by plektix in Economics, Mathematics on 10 19th, 2009 | 4 Comments

The following question was given as a homework problem in a course I’m TAing: CNBC had an interesting program on the current financial crisis. They located one investor who noticed that since the late 1990’s housing prices have been growing 10 percent every year (that is, each year, the average...

Posted by plektix in Culture, Emergence, Evolution, Society on 10 12th, 2009 | 7 Comments

Biologically,modern humans first appeared 160,000 to 200,000 years ago. But the transition to complex human societies, with art, music, advanced tools, occurred a good deal more recently, and moreover, occured at different times in different parts of the world. An article in June’s Science magazine...

Posted by plektix in Uncategorized on 09 4th, 2009 | 2 Comments

An article in July’s PNAS investigates the possibility of predicting a person’s Social Security number from their birth date and place. Exploiting patterns in how SSN’s are assigned, authors Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross developed an algorithm which could correctly predict the first...

Posted by plektix in Complex Links, Complexity, Games on 08 27th, 2009 | 3 Comments

My good friend and computer scientest Kyle Burke has recently started a highly interesting blog on his research field: combinatorial game theory. The idea of this field is to use games as a tool for studying issues of complexity. Though his blog is only a month old, some important foundational ideas have...

The Criminalization of Poverty...

Posted by plektix in Government, Homelessness, Society on 08 9th, 2009 | 4 Comments

Barbara Ehrenreich had an excellent article in yesterday’s New York Times on the many ways that being poor can land you in trouble with the law. One striking example: ...

The Evolution of Bad Ideas...

Posted by plektix in Economics, Evolution, Incentives, Uncategorized on 08 3rd, 2009 | 15 Comments

It is by now common wisdom that our current financial crisis is due in large part to misplaced incentives in our financial system. Analysts and fund managers were rewarded for short-term thinking and risk-taking. If we can rework our financial system to reward long-term, careful planning, it is often...

Biodiversity and Entropy...

Posted by plektix in Uncategorized on 06 28th, 2009 | 5 Comments

On Tuesday, my Erdos number dropped from infinity to four. That’s right: after four years of grad school, I am now officially published! The article, “A New Phylogenetic Diversity Measure Generlizing the Shannon Index and Its Application to Phyllostomid Bats,” by Ben Allen, Mark Kon, Yaneer...

Posted by plektix in Complex Links, Education, Games on 06 11th, 2009 | 6 Comments

A new school is opening in New York for grades 6-12 that completely blows my mind. The Quest to Learn school combines games and complex systems in a way that pretty much would have made my life as a teenager. Hell, I wouldn’t mind going back to high school now if I got to go here. I’ll let...

IIASA...

Posted by plektix in Uncategorized on 06 4th, 2009 | 1 Comment

This is just a brief note to let everyone know I’m spending the summer at IIASA, a scientific policy research institute located just outside of Vienna. IIASA focus on systems analysis of global problems such as climate change, land use, demographic changes, public health, ecology, and energy. They...

Posted by plektix in Evolution on 05 28th, 2009 | No Comments

As an occasional reader of science blogs, I can’t help but notice the extraordinary amount of time and space devoted to the debunking of Creationist and Intelligent Design “science.” Certainly there are good reasons for this: the poor reasoning and scant evidence behind such pseudoscience...

Nature Minus Humans?...

Posted by plektix in Causality, Culture, Interventions, Media, Politics, Scarcity / Abundance on 05 5th, 2009 | 3 Comments

From the “nothing is quite so simple” department, a Boston Globe article this week points out a hidden legacy of the conservation movement: The expulsion of native peoples from their land. ...

Climate Change and Human Nature...

Posted by plektix in Climate, Cooperation on 04 20th, 2009 | 1 Comment

First, let me say how honored I am to be contributing to this blog and to the complex systems web community in general. A New York Times Magazine article raises an issue I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. If you are, as I am, a scientist concerned about global climate change, you may find yourself...